Well, when the order of events is "A committee which Pelosi is member of is discussing the large contract on the VR helmets for the military — Pelosi's husband buys MSFT — The committee anounces that the contract goes to MSFT — MSFT stock rises", and the pattern keeps repeating, it is evidence, albeit circumstantial.

Seriously, I am very serious about preventing conflicts of interest and insider trading. But Microsoft is a terrible example, they are extremely diversified. The contract was announced 3/31 and it's obvious that it had no particular impact on its share price since that date when looking at its peers: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MSFT:NASDAQ?comparison=...

It went from approximately $235 to $250, which is about 6%. On calls, especially short-dated ones, that can easily be a 40-50% gain. I've got a number of different MSFT LEAPS in my portfolio and they all went up 15%+ on that news.

Relative to their peers though: Alphabet went up almost 8% the same day, clearly not due to Microsoft's VR contract.

That seems like the definition of material, non-public information. In the past I don’t think Congress was bound to the same trading rules as the general public (blech), but last I checked, Mr. Pelosi is not in Congress.

Congress is bound by the same rules as the general public, they just aren't legally insiders.

Insider trading requires not only material, non-public but also some kind of duty of confidentiality to the company you are trading.

Congress doesn't have that type of relationship, so they are not insiders. Their spouses aren't either.

There are some additional rules that apply to people who gain knowledge in an official capacity[1], but these were enacted fairly recently and haven't been effective at keeping Congress from trading using the non-public information that they receive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

This falls under misappropriation which does not require the reader to any relationship to the company being traded, only material, non-public information.

I'm not aware of any case law finding that Congress using their knowledge is misappropriation. Do you have any examples to the contrary?

Well they aren't legally insiders because... they made the rules.

Not really, they aren't insiders because when courts interpreted the rather vague laws against fraud in the context of securities trading, they didn't interpret Congress trading based on knowledge received in their job as fraud.

>Pelosi's husband has been very bullish for a long time on Tesla, Apple & tech in general I do believe.

I'm curious where you are reading about Paul Pelosi's stock picks. Regardless, so what? He has no business owning and/or trading shares of companies the person he shares a bed with has influence over.

His name comes up often enough in Finance News Headlines. He makes large transactions. Nancy's office has to file those, so they make great headlines. A quick search should give you thousands of them.

I have no position on your 2nd sentence. I agree in philosophy but acknowledge the details are complicated.

Does Nancy Pelosi have influence over Tesla?

Even if you take a pretty hard-line attitude about members of Congress being prohibited from doing things like trading their own portfolios, it's hard to make a cogent argument that Paul Pelosi, who is by all measures a private citizen, should be restricted from trading specific stocks.

"it's hard to make a cogent argument that Paul Pelosi, who is by all measures a private citizen, should be restricted from trading specific stocks"

No it's not. If you grant that Nancy Pelosi should be treated similarly to a corporate insider, then it is pretty obvious that her spouse should be treated like an insider's would be.

unusualwhales are incentivised to talk their own book so it's safe to assume they've cherry picked these examples.

The honest way to see if politicians get an outsized return from this type of trading is to run a backtest, with appropriate hedges where you buy whenever anyone buys and sell whenever anyone sells and hold for a medium amount of time (3-6 weeks seems reasonable). unusualwhales know this so the fact that this sort of analysis is missing is telling. In particular, note how they provide stats for what the trading trends are, but not for the outsized performance.

The charts at the end of the article are a lot less impressive and they don't obviously look better than random.

In addition to possibly using inside information, they also make the news, ie. potentially profit from policy news that they themselves are making.