Love the font choice! Never heard of Rubik, but I like stocky letters with a tall x-height. Kind of reminds me of Colfax.

https://processtypefoundry.com/fonts/colfax/

I might add the following for a slightly crisper look:

    text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

Thanks! Appreciate the suggestion, I'll check out how that looks.

* * *

How so? One, there are no district-specific rules for members of Congress. But even assuming states are legally able to restrict federal officials' trading, why is it better to have some states regulate it and some states not compared to a consistent federal rule one way or the other? "Good people won't run for Senate if we don't let them trade stocks on the information they get" doesn't really make that much sense to me.

Apparently there was a state rule for the NJ senator that he could not run for president while in senate. They changed it for Cory Booker. So apparently it is possible to add rules for senators and congressman.

There are safeguards we can add and perplexity to trading stock for congressmen. One such rule is the disclosure rule. This makes it a slight pain to invest. A second rule I propose is committee conflict rule, declare stocks that are in conflict with a committee hearing, and offer recusal to the chair each time on a hearing with a potential conflict. A third rule is prohibition on potential stock trades after a committee hearing for 90 days or until hearing is published. And do not disclose details of the hearing with anyone until it is published.

These rules add pains and discouragement to stock trades. But outright bans are not there.

TBH will the regulation change much? If congressmen won't be allow to own stock, they will use proxy (wife, siblings, parents, in-laws).

I think that if there were a law in place that made it illegal for congressmen to trade, it would be easier to catch insider trading because they would be forced to trade by proxy like you mentioned.

It's really hard to prove someone traded off of insider information if they make a decision to buy/sell for themselves. If they don't tell anyone else why they made the trade, you don't really have any proof that it was made off of material non-public information.

If a congressman is forced to ask someone else to trade for them, they might be careless and you might be able to find evidence via text messages or phone records.

The last time a U.S. Representative got convicted for insider trading, it was because he called his son to tell him to trade a stock that he had insider information on: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-congressman-chri...

One thing I've always wondered about this is how to handle circumstantial evidence. Let's say you have a relative who may have insider information on a stock. You talk sometimes but not regularly. They call you (as they occasionally do) the day before you trade a stock and it performs favorably within a short time period.

Are you now in a position where you have to prove a negative? Are there people in prison right now because of exactly this type of occurrence, or is it so circumstantial that it's not even pursued unless there is additional evidence, e.g. you always buy $500-1k in stock but after this call you buy $10k in options or something.

According to one of my finance professors in university, it's somewhat tough to actually get convicted for insider trading, and there are certain circles where everyone does it.

The people who do get convicted are usually those who were being particularly egregious or who pissed someone off enough to rat them out. For example, Martha Stewart got convicted because her assistant (whom she regularly called a "little shit") decided to testify against her.

SEC regulations generally apply equally to family members you make financial decisions for. You can still probably get away with it but the SEC has ammo if you get brazen.

Aka pulling a John Kerry

https://wibc.com/154888/climate-czar-john-kerry-throws-wife-....

Kerry's wife, Theresa Heinz is estimated to have net worth of $750m or more. Is it really a stretch to think that she might be the one who owns the private jet?

Thats not the point at all lol. (Also, why should normal folks have to keep track of how much his wife has?)

The point is repeatedly emphasizing that "personally" he doesn't have a plane meanwhile repeatedly using his wife's plane while being the "Special Presidential Envoy for Climate".

https://www.usglc.org/positions/special-presidential-envoy-f...

People respond to incentives. If you make something harder, people will do less of it.

New barriers include: the actual work of moving money around to and from friends and family and directing trades, counterparty risks in doing so (e.g. sibling dies and leaves money to someone else or takes the money and runs), tax complications, or reputational risk if found to be violating "spirit of the law" that might harm election odds. There are surely more frictions and barriers like these that I'm not capturing.

Does a "Congress tracker fund" make money? What with all the rumoured insider trading ...

AOC claimed the insider trading is an open secret in Congress because:

* Congress members don't get paid much and like money.

* They are often old with healthcare issues. Their govt health plans are not great.

* They maintain two residences, one in DC and one in their home state. AOC rents an apartment in NYC that she never lives in and one in DC. This is a huge expense.

Closing this privilege might have other unintended effects... Only the very wealthy can afford to be in Congress.

They are complaining because they have to live where they work? What a hardship that no one else faces…

These are different problems, right?

> Congress members don't get paid much and like money.

They're paid $174,000 per year. [1] That's 3–4x the median US salary. I know it's not, like, lucrative, but if they wanted a lucrative salary they should have gotten a different job!

> They are often old with healthcare issues. Their govt health plans are not great.

Fix the government health plan. Or better yet, make it a public health plan available to everyone!

> They maintain two residences, one in DC and one in their home state. AOC rents an apartment in NYC that she never lives in and one in DC. This is a huge expense.

There are only 541 of these people (plus aides, etc). The government should have an official building for sitting Congresspeople to live in. Like a dorm, but for electeds!

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

> They're paid $174,000 per year. [1] That's 3–4x the median US salary. I know it's not, like, lucrative, but if they wanted a lucrative salary they should have gotten a different job!

They could also vote themselves a higher salary, but I guess they realize that would be very unpopular with the general public who, for the most part, get paid far less than politicians. The complaint essentially boils down to spoiled brats whining about wanting to be part of the economic elite. For most of the public, this complaint falls on deaf ears, particularly when it's coming from people who already have a great deal of power and are insulated from the realities of life experienced by most of the people they're ostensibly meant to be representing.

"Boo hoo, I already earn 3-4x more than most people in my state and belong to an elite class of policy makers but I'm so impoverished and oppressed because the billionaires have bigger houses than me :("

Honestly more insufferable than Marie Antoinette.

Not when you need to have two residences, one of which in a location well above the average cost of living (DC).

Yes, I covered that. The government should provide housing in DC for Congresspeople and aides. We don’t need to be okay with insider trading.

"We should allow members of Congress to trade stocks using insider information so that poor people can afford to run for Congress" (which costs a million bucks, give or take) is certainly an interesting take.

That seems like a good argument for raising their salaries. Increasing the candidate pool beyond the independently wealthy is good, but letting them do a little crime is a bad way of increasing the candidate pool.

I think there is a delay on stock disclosures, like they only have to disclose purchase/sale once a quarter or something which makes it hard to profitably copy their trading.

But it could be backtested, which I think is the point - "is the supposed insider trading actually profitable for Congress members?"

You can see the backtest performance of some of some strategies built around congressional trading data here: https://www.quiverquant.com/strategies/

The holdings and advanced metrics are behind a paywall (apologies in advance).

I think I recall someone doing that analysis and posting about it on HN, but I don't remember what the conclusion was.

There's been articles which did the math before. Several - really every few years someone takes another pass at it.

They do well. Generally, retiring their tenure wealthier than their congressional salary would allow at a 100% savings rate.

I think the question is really whether they’re trading, say, outperform an index fund of the S&P 500?

> Second, we conduct the first analysis of members’ portfolio holdings, showing that between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381613000194

> For all trades reported electronically and on paper, the buys and sells have the same pattern; they underperform slightly for the first few months and then outperform the market after 150 days by less than 1 percent, which is not statistically significant. Otherwise, the returns of the buys and sells appear to be relatively random.

> The results show that neither Democrat nor Republican senators are especially skilled at picking stocks to buy.

https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2020/04/us-senators-stock-pi...

Honestly a 100% savings rate isn't terribly hard when all your campaign costs are covered, your travel is covered, your office expenses are covered, and lobbyists or donors pick up the tab on a lot of miscellaneous things. Even assuming zero fraud/abuse/illegality, given that you typically already need to be at least moderately successful financially to run for federal office it's not crazy to think that most members of Congress probably already have paid off cars, paid off or close to paid off homes, etc. Not to mention spouses that probably also have very good paying jobs given the connections you're likely to already have by the time you're running.

NANC and KRUZ are the ticker symbols (I wish I was joking)

Interesting that NANC is doing so much better than KRUZ. Any ideas why?

> Interesting that NANC is doing so much better than KRUZ. Any ideas why?

Presumably because they're on different committees. Or have different friends.

Just like existing law, pending legislation is too vast for any one person to know it all.

Nancy Pelosi holds a ton of Microsoft stock, I believe up to $25M last time I checked.

I haven't checked the NANC holdings, but her Microsoft position has definitely been carrying our Nancy Pelosi Strategy on Quiver.

Pretty small out-of-sample window, but we built a trading strategy on top of congressional trading data and it's done well since we launched it last year.

You can see the backtest performance here, but the holdings and advanced metrics are behind a paywall (apologies in advance): https://www.quiverquant.com/strategies/

As others have pointed out, there is a delay between when the trades are made and when they are disclosed and our strategy is able to act on them.

However, this is somewhat countered by the fact that politicians tend to hold stocks for long periods of time.

There are definitely some examples of politicians trading a stock right before a massive market moving event, but I think they are generally looking at a longer time horizon when they are investing.

We should not expect it to beat the market, since legislators themselves don't beat the market:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

> We find no evidence of superior investment performance whether we look in aggregate or at Senators specifically accused of informed trading. Over a six-month horizon, stocks bought by House Members underperform on average by 26 basis points, while stocks sold underperform by 11 basis points.

Sen Cynthia Loomis (R-WY) [EDIT: 'Lummis'] doesn't show up on the list (for stocks), is she still the biggest crypto trader?

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/congresss-crypto-traders-t...

The list on the homepage just shows recent transactions.

You can search for individuals on top to see their full transaction list. Lummis bought up to $100K of Bitcoin in 2021: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Cynth...

I had already searched your site and found nothing. But that was because I misspelled her name as 'Loomis' not 'Lummis'.

Anyway when I search under correct name, I only find 2 trades, from 2021. She really had no other trades?

Yeah looks like it.

Here's where you can search for the source disclosures - only seeing two trades on her periodic transaction reports: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/

Also https://www.capitoltrades.com/

I wish there was a tool that allowed me to follow Congress as if it was an index. Automatically buying and selling what they buy and sell. Right from my Fidelity or something.

If it got popular enough, congressmen would heavily buy a stock their spouse has short term options on, why not?

NANC and KRUZ ETFs track democrats and republican holdings respectively. A word of caution: there are articles online that have looked at individual senators and most of them unperformed compared to the SP500

Someone with some spare cash for seed funding could file with the SEC to create an ETF that does exactly this.

Unusualwhales (not affiliated) does that too!

For me, I'm not sure why there is a "Ms. Nancy Pelosi," and a "Nancy Pelosi," that both have trade activity.

(Nancy Pelosi is interesting. She entered Congress worth about ~3-4 million. Now she is worth $100 million, give or take $20 million depending on the estimate. Interesting. I'm not saying it's Insider Trading, but the probability...)

Pelosi is literally the poster-child for Congressional insider trading.

Wow, Nancy Pelosi is interesting. She entered Congress 36 years ago. If she put $3MM in the S&P index when she joined Congress, and never touched it, it would be worth $108.66MM today. If anything, that's a clear argument she isn't insider trading. I always assumed she was a huge inside trader making a ton of money.

Meanwhile, her husband is a VC, and probably makes a good deal of money for them as well.

>and never touched it,

Didn't she touch it though? A lot of people would be multimillionaires if they only put money in and never took money out.

The question is, with what she did invest, and the money she did take out, would she still be that wealthy.

I have no idea if she touched it. Her husband makes a lot of money and she makes a good amount as well.

Also, that's the lower bound by what people estimated she had when she entered congress and close to the upper bound of what she would be worth today.

But it's entirely possible that someone in the SF area with a SV husband beat the S&P without resorting to insider trading on public markets. Heck, the house she bought has probably beaten the S&P.

To reiterate, I always assumed she was insider trading. These numbers are making me question that.

My point is rather, if she had invested all her money back then and if she never used any of it she would have a similar amount of money now without insider trading.

Most people don't lump sum in the market like that, it probably ignores the taxes she would have to pay if she took the money out now, and most people use some of the money in the meantime.

I'm just saying if you lived a good lifestyle, the money is already mostly taxed, and you didn't invest everything all-at-once, and you still have the amount of money you would get with lump-sum and never touch S&P, you're doing far far better than the market.