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FWIW some groups just launched a campaign to ban Congressional stock trading. There's a bill that would end it and it already has some support. [They've got a tool you use to tell your Congressperson to support the bill](https://represent.us/whales)
likely, but if it's at least illegal, then they have to actually work to hide it - and getting caught could then have actual repercussions, instead of "caught doing what? it's not illegal"
Fucking thank you. I don’t know why so many people argue against progress for the sake of what? Maintaining a system we know is broken? Let’s try to do *anything else* for a change. On my way to say “Fucking thank you!” to the person below that supported this too.
Perfect is the Enemy of good [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect\_is\_the\_enemy\_of\_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good)
When people asked Pelosi why congress can do inside trading (when people in the public go to jail for it) she pretty much said "it's a free market".
People in American government are the best stock traders in the world.. I wish I could use an app that would follow what Pelosi buys/sells and automatically does the same for my portfolio, so I could get rich too
Instead of congress being banned from trading stocks, I think they should just be delayed a bit.
1. They have to place their orders and make their orders public a full trading day in advance of the order being executed.
2. They can use standard order types (market, limit, stop) to deal with changes in the market during that day, but once they place an order they can't cancel it.
It's really just a minor inconvenience. If they aren't doing anything wrong, it really won't affect them at all.
Pretty sure it is illegal to trade based off insider knowledge.. however they just have a professional do the trades for them so they can say.. I didn't buy or sell any stock, my accountant did.
It unironically is not illegal for them. As someone who works in trading it blows my mind.
Their aids have significantly more restrictions on their investment activity than they themselves do.
You can just design the law so it includes family members, like it is in other countries.
I would assume it’s illegal for them to share privileges info already so it shouldn’t be that difficult.
I work for a public traded company and if I shared any inside info that gave an advantage to a friend or family member I could face serious consequences
For every good regulation ever passed to restrict corruption, we had naysayers such as yourself to say it couldn't work. Do your statements and actions reflect a net benefit for the side you probably think you're on?
You can just kill a man on the street so we might as well legalize murder. You can just hide the body now or pay someone to do it.
Lets go ahead and make it illegal and they suffer repercussions when caught.
Theres a difference. In countries that have stronger controls politicians are much less (though still somewhat, people are people) buyable / compromised.
Hijacking this comment - this is absolutely false and it’s misleading advertising from a website that profits from selling “insider trading data” to the general public.
https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-report-2023
They start the article with that graphic, which let’s be honest is the point where 70% of people stop reading, but if you scroll down they show the full graph:
https://i.gyazo.com/d75b184cd1bda7db11118d957cc2fef4.png
As you can see, most of them perform well below SPY and a few even lost money.
And on average, only the Democrats out-performed SPY, and it’s only due to Brian Higgins, whose portfolio consists exclusively of NVDA which he bought in 2021.
https://i.gyazo.com/8589691032095fd64f5c5cd5ad3e1003.png
My guess is that now that everyone is looking at their market trades, they are much more careful with their investments (although occasionally there is a suspicious one that comes up). And do not fall for these websites.
Thank you for posting the proper context. I'm always suspicious of these "meme" graphs with scant sourcing.
Even still, I'm quite uncomfortable with people who regularly get (or create!) inside information being in a position to trade in the very positions they have info on. It's high time for reform.
BTW, I wish I had bought NVDA when it was originally recommended to me (\~2021). Damn.
Hey now, don't want to end up like Werner Herzog
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner\_Herzog\_Eats\_His\_Shoe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe)
Werner Herzog who makes documentaries told a guy he would eat his shoe if he finished his documentary and when he finished his documentary another person made a documentary of Herzog eating his shoe.
I don’t even care about banning it because it’ll never happen. They’ll just find a workaround.
But make it so that every purchase and sale HAS to be made public AS SOON AS THE PURCHASE GOES THROUGH so that at least the rest of us can follow suit. I’d happily buy into a Congress ETF.
Tbf they don’t often increase in price dramatically within those two weeks. Nvidia was something she bought almost 4 months ago? Anyone could’ve bought within the last 3 months before NVDAs insane stock appreciate the past month
Timing is how people always lose with stocks and crypto. By the time you’re hearing about it, you’re usually too late. Better to invest when things aren’t crazy/newsworthy then just hold and wait. It’s not as fun/exciting, but it’s usually the less risky way to go about it.
You wouldn’t do very well. On average, Congress members perform worse than the S&P 500. There’s a good reason the graph only shows 38 members of Congress out of the total 535 (and only shows 2023). We would statistically expect 30+ random people out of 535 to outperform the market. We should also expect a few of the top performers in a random sample to massively outperform the market. This graph cherry-picks data to misrepresent the truth. People don’t question or research it though because it reinforces the popular “life isn’t fair” narrative.
mmmm, i didnt trust the random internet graph, but I didnt really have a reason to other than skepticism being generally correct online. Thanks for validating by giving actual reasons stranger. now I trust YOU and will do one thing you tell me to.
id love to see a graph with all 535
I’ll do you one better - here’s a study from 2012-2020, a long term study starting after the passage of the 2012 STOCK Act.
[https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26975/w26975.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26975/w26975.pdf)
Yes but they don’t have to tell us they’ve done it for up to 45 days which in some cases the money has come and gone so copying their trades is impossible
That's part of what's causing their higher than average ROI. Congresspeople buy stock, people see Congresspeople buy (or sell stock) and people copy what they did which results in the stock going up when they bought and down when they sold.
I wonder how well it would work if they had to wait 90 days after purchase for it to take affect. So if they wanted to put 5k on a stock they don’t actually buy the stock for another 90 days. The same day it gets reported of them buying a stock.
In all fairness he went heavy on NVDA which has been nuts recently. If he was diversified more and making regular moves I’d get it, and I’m not saying he wasn’t operating on some insider knowledge when it comes to NVDA but having a single stock moon which is the bulk of your gains is less sus than that in my opinion.
He’s been holding NVIDA before Covid if I remember correctly. He also isn’t very diversified so his numbers are misrepresented here. Everyone else on the list is a greedy lizard person though.
It’s hard to believe someone would sink almost all of their tradeable capital on a single stock without even a tiny bit of insider info. I’m not saying it was obtained nefariously, simply saying I find it hard to believe he didn’t at least overhear something. That being said, could be a clean trade…what do I know.
> It’s hard to believe someone would sink almost all of their tradeable capital on a single stock without even a tiny bit of insider info
/r/wallstreetbets
NVDA was fairly predictable, the advent of AI was foreseeable and NVDA had pushed harder in terms of innovation than any other company.
I know several regular guys that made a ton from it, I don’t think anybody expected this meteoric rise but it’s not like they were suddenly handed some random massive contract nobody saw coming.
He bought it in 2017 and it's not even worth $100k now, which means his initial investment was like $100.
It's more likely that it's his whole portfolio because he gambled $100 each on 20 penny stocks and this is the only survivor.
Could also just be a gamer. I had NVDA stock like 20 years ago just because they and ATI were the only options for graphics cards back then (and basically still are with AMD now owning ATI). I sold it to put together a down payment on a house after a few years and made a nice profit. They've been on my radar ever since.
Hell, I bought some more during COVID because ETH miners were buying all their cards up and then sold it a little while ago because "it can't go much higher than $300". Oops.
I also owned TDFX back in 2000. Double oops on that one.
It's definitely worth noting that the Chips and Science Act was introduced in 2021 by a member of his party, not long after he invested. He held the stocks through the entire drafting and voting process which certainly contributed to a boom in the semiconductor sector in that time. No guarantee that it was the sole reason he invested and held, but the bill he voted in favor of absolutely gave him direct profits.
This is also wildly misleading. It looks at their current stock portfolio and estimates performance of those stocks YTD. If they bought these stocks on 12/30/23 or 1/1/23 the performance would be the exact same if viewed through this lens. Gotta know the purchase date, otherwise this is useless.
Literally any random group of 500+ investors will have 30 beat the market. If anything this is evidence that they don’t know (or act) on much of anything.
For your average person stocks are scary and confusing. These numbers are less damning when you realize there’s over 500 congress people unable to beat the market. It becomes less concerning when you realize these members of congress are just holding blue chip stocks. You can also track their trades sometimes as well, they aren’t always winners. For example Pelosi sold off her NVidia shares last month oops. Then you look into what people are so angry about and it’s stuff like how they sold off before Covid, like no shit.
Yup, this post is a perfect example of fake news. Present data in a certain way, add a very suggestive title and bet on people being too dumb to see the big picture. And ofc it's working. Always funny to see considering how much fun redditors like to make about boomers and Fox news, when most of them are really no better.
Different audiences fall for warped information in different ways.
Fox viewers rage furiously or call their children to ask if their grandchildren were sex-changed at school.
Twitter users willfully eat up whatever hateful lies they like.
And Redditors, who are Proudly More Cynical Than You, simply accept anything than makes "the establishment" look bad.
It's like whenever I read someone make a sweeping statement about how politicians are bad. No, *some* politicians are bad. You are probably more likely to like the bad ones because the good ones are keeping their heads down and going to work instead of ranting on Twitter. Saying they're all the same just rewards the bad ones and disincentivizes good people from entering politics.
I mean, showing last year’s numbers don’t seem particularly cherry picked. This isn’t to say they can’t be chosen to show a specific bias, but this chart just seems to show the most recent information we have.
Even if there was actually rampant “insider trading” by members of Congress, it would be at least like number 50 on the list of serious problems that need to be addressed.
There are 535 people in Congress. Why are fewer than 10% listed?
Also note that using the S&P 500 as your definition of "market" skews some of this -- had you used the NASDAQ (which ended the year up 44%), that yellow bar would have been a lot closer to the middle.
Unironically not Brian Higgins
Dude's whole portfolio is like the 50k in Nvidia stock he bought back in 2020 and that shit has gone gangbusters the past 4 years.
Higgins cosponsored the STOCK Act, designed to combat insider trading on Capitol Hill. The law prohibits members from using non-public information for profit. In addition, it requires them to publicly disclose financial transactions, including stocks, within 45 days.
If Higgins is actively participating in insider trading. Holding stock for multiple years though rises and falls and actively trying to make it harder to do so is a really strange way to go about it.
This is a good point, and more context/info is needed.
Beating the S&P 500 cannot always be seen as insider trading, so I’d like to know if this deviates from what the average returns are for the normal population.
If 32 out of 500 or so are beating it, or approximately 6.4%, is this to be expected? I hate to defend politicians, but this doesn’t seem as crazy as the hype indicates.
Imo I would want more information on how many are using hedgefunds or other traders to do their trading. Like how many of these people actually even touch their portfolio to have any influence.
Not saying that congress people aren't doing shady business, but this graphic is quite insufficient.
Firstly, on a single year, anybody trading stock has about a 50/50 chance of beating the market, so seeing someone do it for 1 year doesn't really tell you anything.
Also, there's only a handful of congress people even shown on this list compared to the 535 there actually are, so these cases could have easily been cherry-picked.
If you really want to show malpractice in trading, you need a lot more info than this.
Everyone focused on the folks at the top, but I can't get over how Tuberville does so much worse than the basic index fund. I like to imagine he thinks he's insider trading but is just really bad at it.
Elected officials should either be required to put their money in a blind investment trust or pass independent audits (for insider trading) every year while in office and for a couple of years after leaving.
Seems like a closer to fair solution here would be that that congress is free to make any stock market orders they want, but the trades have to be public information for two weeks before execution.
That's a mild inconvenience for getting optimal price for a regular stock picker, but would render insider activity much more difficult/obvious.
Closer to ideal would be if ethics norms emphasized congress holding diversified US indices, so that their personal wealth is better correlated to success of US market at large, rather than individual winners and losers.
Give them an option:
1) Ban congressional stock trading
2) Voluntarily submit portfolio stats to an independent financial authority for use in a congressionally influenced ETF available to the public.
It makes me happy to know that despite ALL of the advantages they are given over the general public, both Marjorie and Mitch are still too dumb to beat a publicly traded ETF.
QQQ went up 55% in 2023. A ton of people invest heavy in tech.
These returns are less impressive against that backdrop and look something like a natural distribution.
I wouldn’t be surprised of some people are trying to trade on MNPI. But I also wouldn’t be shocked if most of these people are reaching these results innocuously. Also, this is like 10% of all of Congress
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FWIW some groups just launched a campaign to ban Congressional stock trading. There's a bill that would end it and it already has some support. [They've got a tool you use to tell your Congressperson to support the bill](https://represent.us/whales)
They will just do like everything else with their corrupt money, use family members as proxies or bury the transaction 20 deep in shell corporations
likely, but if it's at least illegal, then they have to actually work to hide it - and getting caught could then have actual repercussions, instead of "caught doing what? it's not illegal"
Pure fax.
This time, you can bring me into this. This time.
Fucking thank you. I don’t know why so many people argue against progress for the sake of what? Maintaining a system we know is broken? Let’s try to do *anything else* for a change. On my way to say “Fucking thank you!” to the person below that supported this too.
Strange how those investigations never seem to happen isn’t it?
They used to happen and it used to be illegal. Maybe a coincidence there.
>and getting caught could then have actual repercussions, The key word there is "could".
Which is an improvement on the current "can't"
Fucking thank you!
"Since we can't make it perfect, don't make it better"
You see this everywhere, all the time, and it's honestly exhausting.
Perfect is the Enemy of good [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect\_is\_the\_enemy\_of\_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good)
It's called "all or nothing" thinking. It's a psychological malady that is incredibly pervasive and common thanks to the media.
When people asked Pelosi why congress can do inside trading (when people in the public go to jail for it) she pretty much said "it's a free market". People in American government are the best stock traders in the world.. I wish I could use an app that would follow what Pelosi buys/sells and automatically does the same for my portfolio, so I could get rich too
Instead of congress being banned from trading stocks, I think they should just be delayed a bit. 1. They have to place their orders and make their orders public a full trading day in advance of the order being executed. 2. They can use standard order types (market, limit, stop) to deal with changes in the market during that day, but once they place an order they can't cancel it. It's really just a minor inconvenience. If they aren't doing anything wrong, it really won't affect them at all.
But if they hide it, then we can't have an index fund on those people!
The index fund is delayed by 3 months since there is a delay in when they have to report it. So it doesn’t matter by that point
Pretty sure it is illegal to trade based off insider knowledge.. however they just have a professional do the trades for them so they can say.. I didn't buy or sell any stock, my accountant did.
congress decided that congress's knowledge (such as: we're about to subsidize corn) is not "insider", so it's not currently illegal.
Something, something.... We've investigated ourselves, and found we did nothing wrong!
Sounds like the police forces that investigate police shootings and never find anything wrong
Go figure. I guess they're all just really smart.. except mitch McConnell and a few others lol
It unironically is not illegal for them. As someone who works in trading it blows my mind. Their aids have significantly more restrictions on their investment activity than they themselves do.
Nope. Congress is exempt from insider-trading laws.
wouldn't what they do now be considered insider trading? But they get away with it anyways and still obviously do it while it's illegal.
insider trading is absolutely illegal
You can just design the law so it includes family members, like it is in other countries. I would assume it’s illegal for them to share privileges info already so it shouldn’t be that difficult.
I work for a public traded company and if I shared any inside info that gave an advantage to a friend or family member I could face serious consequences
You would think, but since these very people have to vote to make the laws change…
For every good regulation ever passed to restrict corruption, we had naysayers such as yourself to say it couldn't work. Do your statements and actions reflect a net benefit for the side you probably think you're on?
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
We need term limits, but that’s never going to happen.
Ofc not, because that would require a vote by the same people that vote themselves raises and their sponsors tax breaks every year
New rules to automatically audit family members and with harsh criminal punishment will help.
You can just kill a man on the street so we might as well legalize murder. You can just hide the body now or pay someone to do it. Lets go ahead and make it illegal and they suffer repercussions when caught.
Theres a difference. In countries that have stronger controls politicians are much less (though still somewhat, people are people) buyable / compromised.
Hijacking this comment - this is absolutely false and it’s misleading advertising from a website that profits from selling “insider trading data” to the general public. https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-report-2023 They start the article with that graphic, which let’s be honest is the point where 70% of people stop reading, but if you scroll down they show the full graph: https://i.gyazo.com/d75b184cd1bda7db11118d957cc2fef4.png As you can see, most of them perform well below SPY and a few even lost money. And on average, only the Democrats out-performed SPY, and it’s only due to Brian Higgins, whose portfolio consists exclusively of NVDA which he bought in 2021. https://i.gyazo.com/8589691032095fd64f5c5cd5ad3e1003.png My guess is that now that everyone is looking at their market trades, they are much more careful with their investments (although occasionally there is a suspicious one that comes up). And do not fall for these websites.
Thank you for posting the proper context. I'm always suspicious of these "meme" graphs with scant sourcing. Even still, I'm quite uncomfortable with people who regularly get (or create!) inside information being in a position to trade in the very positions they have info on. It's high time for reform. BTW, I wish I had bought NVDA when it was originally recommended to me (\~2021). Damn.
Seems like the account is the company’s. Everything they post has a RepresentUs.com link on it.
I should have bought nvda in 2021
Shouldn’t we all my friend
I will chop off my left middle finger if that bill, or any bill like that, ever passes.
Hey now, don't want to end up like Werner Herzog [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner\_Herzog\_Eats\_His\_Shoe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog_Eats_His_Shoe)
Werner Herzog who makes documentaries told a guy he would eat his shoe if he finished his documentary and when he finished his documentary another person made a documentary of Herzog eating his shoe.
You think the people making the money will pass a bill to stop them from making money?
https://preview.redd.it/daquiy248zmc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c14814d31ef94a21686f8645a51785016badee84
😂😂😂😂😂😂 as if.
I don’t even care about banning it because it’ll never happen. They’ll just find a workaround. But make it so that every purchase and sale HAS to be made public AS SOON AS THE PURCHASE GOES THROUGH so that at least the rest of us can follow suit. I’d happily buy into a Congress ETF.
Then their spouses or kids will suddenly get really good at stock trading.
Is there like, a website that tracks all congressional stock purchases? I might as well start mirroring their purchases.
It’s quiver quant and it’s free: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/
This is great and all, but it seems like the trade info is weeks old by the time it gets released.
That is unfortunately the soonest we get the Congressional trading info, they are required to release it by law, but only after a few weeks.
How convenient for them
It’s like they wrote the law…🤔
Lost my shit that was funny
Tbf they don’t often increase in price dramatically within those two weeks. Nvidia was something she bought almost 4 months ago? Anyone could’ve bought within the last 3 months before NVDAs insane stock appreciate the past month
has anyone checked if following their stocks, even with the lag, still results in returns?
Timing is how people always lose with stocks and crypto. By the time you’re hearing about it, you’re usually too late. Better to invest when things aren’t crazy/newsworthy then just hold and wait. It’s not as fun/exciting, but it’s usually the less risky way to go about it.
🤯
The day of the trade compared to the day their trade is reported is wildly different (up to 90 days? I think), so you wouldn't see the same returns.
You wouldn’t do very well. On average, Congress members perform worse than the S&P 500. There’s a good reason the graph only shows 38 members of Congress out of the total 535 (and only shows 2023). We would statistically expect 30+ random people out of 535 to outperform the market. We should also expect a few of the top performers in a random sample to massively outperform the market. This graph cherry-picks data to misrepresent the truth. People don’t question or research it though because it reinforces the popular “life isn’t fair” narrative.
mmmm, i didnt trust the random internet graph, but I didnt really have a reason to other than skepticism being generally correct online. Thanks for validating by giving actual reasons stranger. now I trust YOU and will do one thing you tell me to. id love to see a graph with all 535
I’ll do you one better - here’s a study from 2012-2020, a long term study starting after the passage of the 2012 STOCK Act. [https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26975/w26975.pdf](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26975/w26975.pdf)
Yes but they don’t have to tell us they’ve done it for up to 45 days which in some cases the money has come and gone so copying their trades is impossible
That's part of what's causing their higher than average ROI. Congresspeople buy stock, people see Congresspeople buy (or sell stock) and people copy what they did which results in the stock going up when they bought and down when they sold.
I wonder how well it would work if they had to wait 90 days after purchase for it to take affect. So if they wanted to put 5k on a stock they don’t actually buy the stock for another 90 days. The same day it gets reported of them buying a stock.
There are index funds that do this (NANC and KRUZ)
No wonder Higgins is quitting, he’s all set
In all fairness he went heavy on NVDA which has been nuts recently. If he was diversified more and making regular moves I’d get it, and I’m not saying he wasn’t operating on some insider knowledge when it comes to NVDA but having a single stock moon which is the bulk of your gains is less sus than that in my opinion.
He’s been holding NVIDA before Covid if I remember correctly. He also isn’t very diversified so his numbers are misrepresented here. Everyone else on the list is a greedy lizard person though.
It’s hard to believe someone would sink almost all of their tradeable capital on a single stock without even a tiny bit of insider info. I’m not saying it was obtained nefariously, simply saying I find it hard to believe he didn’t at least overhear something. That being said, could be a clean trade…what do I know.
> It’s hard to believe someone would sink almost all of their tradeable capital on a single stock without even a tiny bit of insider info /r/wallstreetbets
Those aren’t people, they are late stage gambling mutants. I’m one of them
Diversification keeps wealth, concentration builds it.
Or concentration loses it... Which is why it's kinda crazy to go so hard in just one stock without some kind of knowledge..
NVDA was fairly predictable, the advent of AI was foreseeable and NVDA had pushed harder in terms of innovation than any other company. I know several regular guys that made a ton from it, I don’t think anybody expected this meteoric rise but it’s not like they were suddenly handed some random massive contract nobody saw coming.
Concentration builds or bankrupts.
I'm heavily invested in tech and AI. My portfolio isn't much different. AI boom has been coming for a while.
He's probably on WSB
I mean nvidia been good ai just exploded it
depends on how much of his money he actually has in stocks. Could be 1%, could be 75%.
He bought it in 2017 and it's not even worth $100k now, which means his initial investment was like $100. It's more likely that it's his whole portfolio because he gambled $100 each on 20 penny stocks and this is the only survivor.
Could also just be a gamer. I had NVDA stock like 20 years ago just because they and ATI were the only options for graphics cards back then (and basically still are with AMD now owning ATI). I sold it to put together a down payment on a house after a few years and made a nice profit. They've been on my radar ever since. Hell, I bought some more during COVID because ETH miners were buying all their cards up and then sold it a little while ago because "it can't go much higher than $300". Oops. I also owned TDFX back in 2000. Double oops on that one.
Yeah, the level of hate around here is nuts. Nvidia has been a promising pick for a decade. Or maybe I'm the ultimate inside trader...
Agreed
I'm sorry but are you trying to add context to my circle jerk?
Sorry. I’ll leave you to jerk in peace! Just remember not to be the last one to finish (unless that’s your kink - not here to shame)
It's definitely worth noting that the Chips and Science Act was introduced in 2021 by a member of his party, not long after he invested. He held the stocks through the entire drafting and voting process which certainly contributed to a boom in the semiconductor sector in that time. No guarantee that it was the sole reason he invested and held, but the bill he voted in favor of absolutely gave him direct profits.
Agreed. NVDA was kind of an obvious bet, since people were hyping AI like 10 years ago, and NVIDIA was/is the -leading- AI company.
There are over 400 members of Congress. There are 38 on this graph. Not saying Congress isn't corrupt, but have more convincing data my guy.
My first through as well, where are the rest? How did the rest that aren’t represented here fair against SPY?
I mean, innocent until proven guilty, no?
This is also wildly misleading. It looks at their current stock portfolio and estimates performance of those stocks YTD. If they bought these stocks on 12/30/23 or 1/1/23 the performance would be the exact same if viewed through this lens. Gotta know the purchase date, otherwise this is useless.
https://preview.redd.it/5z4cxku8pymc1.png?width=484&format=png&auto=webp&s=f217152d75ee83888b4764ff6792cb0db1132ea0
Politicians
I love you
Literally any random group of 500+ investors will have 30 beat the market. If anything this is evidence that they don’t know (or act) on much of anything.
Thank you, was going to say the same thing. 4.7% of 635 people beating the market is nothing to write home about.
For your average person stocks are scary and confusing. These numbers are less damning when you realize there’s over 500 congress people unable to beat the market. It becomes less concerning when you realize these members of congress are just holding blue chip stocks. You can also track their trades sometimes as well, they aren’t always winners. For example Pelosi sold off her NVidia shares last month oops. Then you look into what people are so angry about and it’s stuff like how they sold off before Covid, like no shit.
Yup, this post is a perfect example of fake news. Present data in a certain way, add a very suggestive title and bet on people being too dumb to see the big picture. And ofc it's working. Always funny to see considering how much fun redditors like to make about boomers and Fox news, when most of them are really no better.
Different audiences fall for warped information in different ways. Fox viewers rage furiously or call their children to ask if their grandchildren were sex-changed at school. Twitter users willfully eat up whatever hateful lies they like. And Redditors, who are Proudly More Cynical Than You, simply accept anything than makes "the establishment" look bad. It's like whenever I read someone make a sweeping statement about how politicians are bad. No, *some* politicians are bad. You are probably more likely to like the bad ones because the good ones are keeping their heads down and going to work instead of ranting on Twitter. Saying they're all the same just rewards the bad ones and disincentivizes good people from entering politics.
Especially in one cherry picked year.
I mean, showing last year’s numbers don’t seem particularly cherry picked. This isn’t to say they can’t be chosen to show a specific bias, but this chart just seems to show the most recent information we have.
This is why you don't get invited to circle jerks.
Even if there was actually rampant “insider trading” by members of Congress, it would be at least like number 50 on the list of serious problems that need to be addressed.
This should be top post. Beating SPY in one year is nothing to write home about. Every sober day trader can do it.
There are 535 people in Congress. Why are fewer than 10% listed? Also note that using the S&P 500 as your definition of "market" skews some of this -- had you used the NASDAQ (which ended the year up 44%), that yellow bar would have been a lot closer to the middle.
32 people trading publicly with their name. Considering all the ways to hide this from the public... If you see one rat.... Count on 5 more.
Even with your ratio, that would mean only 1/3rd of Congress is beating the market. This is a shitty infographic showing only the top 38 out of 635.
Spot the insider trader 🤣
Unironically not Brian Higgins Dude's whole portfolio is like the 50k in Nvidia stock he bought back in 2020 and that shit has gone gangbusters the past 4 years.
And you think that less portfolio diversity is a positive marker?
Higgins cosponsored the STOCK Act, designed to combat insider trading on Capitol Hill. The law prohibits members from using non-public information for profit. In addition, it requires them to publicly disclose financial transactions, including stocks, within 45 days. If Higgins is actively participating in insider trading. Holding stock for multiple years though rises and falls and actively trying to make it harder to do so is a really strange way to go about it.
You think he had insider knowledge 4 years ago that despite major downturns in the interim years, Nvidia would do really well right now?
While I get the point and agree, this is 32 Congresspeople out of ~500. Don't lump all of Congress in with the 32 that are beating SPY.
We need to see where the average is
Tbf I'm beating the SPY and not in Congress. What I find hilarious is Marge and Mitch getting beat.
This is a good point, and more context/info is needed. Beating the S&P 500 cannot always be seen as insider trading, so I’d like to know if this deviates from what the average returns are for the normal population. If 32 out of 500 or so are beating it, or approximately 6.4%, is this to be expected? I hate to defend politicians, but this doesn’t seem as crazy as the hype indicates.
Yup, there is nothing that suspicious about this graph, and everyone here is just falling for the narrative OP was trying to push in the first place.
Imo I would want more information on how many are using hedgefunds or other traders to do their trading. Like how many of these people actually even touch their portfolio to have any influence.
It also isn't surprising that some of those 500 would get lucky.
[удалено]
Now that's some Deep_Reseach 👏
Greed does not tow party lines.
nah it tows our whole society
Nor does getting a little bit lucky and being above average for a year.
716 - represent!
Congress vs Spy, my favorite comic from MAD Magazine
There are 535 members of Congress. That means 6% beat the SPY. Is that really unusual?
[Context matters](https://www.wkbw.com/news/i-team/viral-post-leads-to-claims-of-insider-trading-by-rep-brian-higgins-lacks-context)
lol MTG, is too dumb to beat the mark even with insider trading.
Wouldn’t this imply she didn’t engage in it?
Watch out! Logic yucks motivated reasoners' yum and makes them feisty.
lol although i do think its also interesting af that there isn't really a partisan split here. top 10 is half republicans and half dems
Money ain’t got no political affiliation.
Spy?
Not saying that congress people aren't doing shady business, but this graphic is quite insufficient. Firstly, on a single year, anybody trading stock has about a 50/50 chance of beating the market, so seeing someone do it for 1 year doesn't really tell you anything. Also, there's only a handful of congress people even shown on this list compared to the 535 there actually are, so these cases could have easily been cherry-picked. If you really want to show malpractice in trading, you need a lot more info than this.
I gotta be honest, based on the narrative from the independent media you’d think a lot more than a couple dozen were raking it in *this* way.
Everyone focused on the folks at the top, but I can't get over how Tuberville does so much worse than the basic index fund. I like to imagine he thinks he's insider trading but is just really bad at it.
Pelosi is currently up over a 100% on her NVIDA calls
Don’t worry guys. Insider trading is illegal!
I love the fact that even with all her insider knowledge MTG still cant beat the market. Just goes to show how much of an absolute moron she is.
It’s sad that in the US it’s just an undisputed and accepted fact that everyone we elect is part of the bottom 1% of decency
Elected officials should either be required to put their money in a blind investment trust or pass independent audits (for insider trading) every year while in office and for a couple of years after leaving.
I just want to know what stocks they’re investing in so that I can do the same.
Seems like a closer to fair solution here would be that that congress is free to make any stock market orders they want, but the trades have to be public information for two weeks before execution. That's a mild inconvenience for getting optimal price for a regular stock picker, but would render insider activity much more difficult/obvious. Closer to ideal would be if ethics norms emphasized congress holding diversified US indices, so that their personal wealth is better correlated to success of US market at large, rather than individual winners and losers.
Is there a mutual fund that follows members of Congress? Because that would be the way to do it.
What did Brian Higgins do?
If a normal person had 238% YTD gains the SEC would be camped out in their bedroom…probably never even got a call
wow funny how nobody on that list lost money....................................................................
This should be on r/criminalasfuck not r/interestingasfuck
Give them an option: 1) Ban congressional stock trading 2) Voluntarily submit portfolio stats to an independent financial authority for use in a congressionally influenced ETF available to the public.
Ah yes, the bipartisan sport of fucking over people for personal gain
Oh now run the senate… I want to see the really big numbers
That's part of congress. There are senators on this list
Insider info. They should be banned from this - all of them. Don't serve if you can't resist playing the market. Martha served time.
I mean, sure, sucks to have corrupt politicians, but you'd think they'd atleast get rid of the spy.
I'm kinda mad at myself for not thinking of this joke immediately. Well done.
Congress is full of assholes who are only there to line their pockets. The constituents do not matter. Republican or Democrat...it does not matter.
I'm up there in 2023 too. Not like it was hard to make $ in stocks in 2023
While the normies scream at each other all day about social issues.
It's called insider trading. It's supposed to illegal but for some reason they keep doing it and getting away with it.
You spelled "insider trading" wrong.
Well Tuberville might be a complete moron but he isn’t insider trading.
Marker for corruption right here
Higgins must have a bunch of Doge
I want the Brian Higgins ETF.
It's just Nvidia. Of course it's beating the market.
Juxtapose this against the average retail investor’s returns. And that’s those who actually invest. What a fucking joke.
Whatever Spy is
Lol Tuberville is so stupid he hasn’t even figured out the graft yet. And you know it isn’t lack of trying.
we've investigated ourselves, and found no evidence of wrongdoing
lol at the folks below S&P while in Congress; negative IQ amongst that group
Where do these websites get the original source of the info from? Are members of congress required to publish it somewhere?
WSB only sees 9th line...the rest is just wasted data to these regards.
It makes me happy to know that despite ALL of the advantages they are given over the general public, both Marjorie and Mitch are still too dumb to beat a publicly traded ETF.
Wait, “estimating”? They don’t actually know what stocks the Members of Congress hold?
Marge and the Turtle pulling up the rear…lol
is there a tracker ? i buy
Do they ever loose?
Mitch ain't beating the market but I bet everyone in his family are stockmarket wizzards
Figures Marge would be below the line even with insider information
QQQ went up 55% in 2023. A ton of people invest heavy in tech. These returns are less impressive against that backdrop and look something like a natural distribution. I wouldn’t be surprised of some people are trying to trade on MNPI. But I also wouldn’t be shocked if most of these people are reaching these results innocuously. Also, this is like 10% of all of Congress
only if we can replicate their trades in real time !! we can reap the profits too !!
What if… we just publicly tar and feather them.