well, for one, members of congress are legally allowed to insider trade.

pretty convenient laws when you make the laws.

> well, for one, members of congress are legally allowed to insider trade.

Are they?

Highlight link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act#:~:text=The%20law%20....

Spoiler: members of Congress are not allowed to trade on inside information. We haven't yet seen a prosecution, however.

Why go after congress members making millions when you can go after software engineers making thousands?

> even the Fed itself and its members were involved in trades that could only be explained by insider knowledge

What's your source for this? We've seen questionably-timed broad-market transactions that yielded a few points. (The officials were fired and the Fed revised its rules.) But nothing that looks like insider trading.

The simple answer may be more mundane. Anyone who has spent time on Wall Street or in rule making knows how effective the SEC's systems are at catching insider trades ex post facto. The only seeming way around it is to avoid letting your trades get too profitable. At which point the risk-reward ratio becomes unattractive for anyone with much to lose.

Because it's not as obvious regarding congress. Person A gets tip, hands to B and makes trade, is a direct link and can be proven in court. Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market.

> Also, Congress has 532 people, so by statistical certainty we should expect some to beat the market.

Congress has many individuals that consistently beat the market by significant margins over a prolonged period of time, far past the point of reasonable arguments that you can make based on statistics.

"We find weak evidence of informed trading for the pre-Congress period, suggesting that informed traders are not being selected into office. When combined with our finding that the portfolios of members serving on powerful committees outperform the market during their second term in office, this provides additional evidence that serving on influential committees is the mechanism by which members of Congress earn abnormal returns."

http://busecon.wvu.edu/phd_economics/pdf/16-25.pdf

Congress may outperform in the aggregate, but this is not enough to prove that they illegally traded. There are other possible explanations.

What explanations do you suggest?

Being new congress members have given them ample free time to learn financial theories and market strategies from MIT OpenCourseware

Sure but many are beating the market by making trades on companies that those members are supposed to regulate.

what is one such example of a trade. I can only find examples of congresspeople making stock trades, not trades based off of specific pieces of insider information in a manner similar to this SEC report. Do you mean trades initiated before legislation?

Sure but Pelosi, Feinstein etc etc are so very very clever they'd have become multi-millionaires by them & their partners investing in the market if they didn't regulate those companies. /s

Case of Pelosi comes so often but she is a very weak example. Came from $300,000,000 family fortune "her" stock picks (she obviously doesn't pick herself but has financial firm representing and making moves on her behalf) did merely $6,000,000 in last 10 years, according to her tax statements. I don't get why her "inside trading" and her fridge full of ice-cream triggers so many people; people who clearly haven't done a basic research.

Because her husband is the person making their trades? That seems pretty far from "weak" to me.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nancy-pelosi-discloses-stock...

They have to disclose when family members make the trades, as shown by the article you posted. So its not really clever when it still gets disclosed. And something like having a spouse do the trades certainly isn't either. That's easy for the SEC to check too.

But what evidence is there that any of that is trading on non public information? I just lists off some of the most popular companies out there to invest in. The trades include AmEx, Apple, PayPal, Disney, Slack, Tesla, Alphabet, Facebook, and Netflix. I would be surprised if they didn't trade in many of those companies.

Pelosi knows whether google are going to have a whole bunch of very expensive anti-monopoly regulation get up. She might even influence that. Her assessment of the prospects of competing regulation is non-public and could change when she has a shower. She is right in the non-public information /by/ /definition/. And when she says she won't let her family financial interests affect her judgement do you believe that?

It's not "illegal" for her to tell her husband to buy google and then work to kill that regulation. There is zero prospect of her being prosecuted if you could prove that beyond all doubt.

Smell that stench wafting out of Washington. Got nothing whatever to do with R v D so we need to make sure we bring up republicans here to kill any chance of reforming the endemic (yet legal) corruption.

I simply don't believe you can regulate something you own. If you do, sure, that's your opinion and you are entitled to it. I believe that regulatory intent is non-public, that seems pretty clear tbh. I believe her husband would know if she had the knives out for google to take one example as he would know if she was going to make sure they aren't going to run into regulatory issues. Disagrees, sure, but there's not much to talk about beyond that. Maybe an illustrative example helps.

If you traded based on knowledge learned from the CEO of google that he'd privately met with Pelosi and she was onboard for google to do anything it wants without any further regulation while simultaneously she publicly claimed she was going to regulate them back to the 1970s. You can go to jail for trading on that information, so can the CEO, and yet she can't. I hope you can see the point now.

I totally agree that they shouldn't trade stocks. Put it in a blind trust or something. There is all sorts of bias there in regulations or lack thereof. But what you have still not presented is evidence that inside information has actually been used to make those trade. Is it possible? Absolutely. But where is the proof behind your accusations? I have yet to see anyone produce actual proof, just speculation.

Trading on information from a private meeting with a CEO is textbook insider trading, and whoever does that absolutely can get charged for that.

Now if someone were to know they are about to introduce major legislation to regulate tech companies, and trades on that information before doing so. That absolutely is wrong, and should be illegal. But unfortunately it isn't. And I doubt they will actually end up regulating themselves.

The onus is on a person with privileged information to show that they did not use that information to inform their trades. This is why the CEO can't trade whenever s/he feels like it, for example. "You can't prove I used inside information." To which the attitude is, sure, so what? You had access to it, you traded, get a lawyer. "Sure the CEO told me they were about to be acquired but you can't prove I used that information when I invested a few million in their company." And you really can't prove it yet prosecutions occur.

Pelosi and plenty of others have material, non public information. They and their partners trade knowing that material, non-public information. They make rather good returns, better than you. Better than your retirement savings. It STINKS to high heaven. Focus on that part and reforming it. It's not partisan it's not ok if you're an independent.

Unless she is investing 100% of her fortune into stock picking those two numbers are completely unrelated and don't inform the discussion one iota.