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Comment by martey | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't the STOCK Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act) explicitly ban Congresspeople from insider trading?

The only study on the performance on Congressional stock portfolios is from 2004 [1]. Do you know of any post-STOCK studies?

[1]: Ziobrowski, A.J., Cheng, P.X., Boyd, J.W., and Ziobrowski, B.J. (2004) “Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of Members of the United States Senate.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 661-676. (http://www.walkerd.people.cofc.edu/400/Sobel/P-04.%20Ziobrow...)

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NOPE!

"Congress Quickly And Quietly Rolls Back Insider Trading Rules For Itself"

"It was such a national risk that Congress did the whole thing quietly, with no debate. The bill was introduced in the Senate on Thursday and quickly voted on late that night when no one was paying attention. Friday afternoon (the best time to sneak through news), the House picked it up by unanimous consent. The House ignored its own promise to give Congress three days to read a bill before holding a vote, because this kind of thing is too important to let anyone read the bill before Congress had to pass it."

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130416/08344222725/congr...

I already explained this in my reply to bsbechtel's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045388). The amendment makes retrieving disclosure reports more difficult, but does not repeal the STOCK Act's explicit prohibition on insider trading by politicians.

I'm pretty sure the key provisions of the STOCK Act were repealed the same weekend as the Boston Marathon Bombings. See the amendment section of the Wikipedia article you linked to.

The amendment makes it significantly more difficult to detect insider trading (since financial disclosure reports are not available online), but I wouldn't describe it as a repeal of the law's "key provisions". See http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/177496... :

"Still, two major elements of the law remain. Insider trading is illegal, even for members of Congress and the executive branch. And for those who are covered by the now-narrower law, disclosures of large stock trades are required within 45 days."

> The amendment makes it significantly more difficult to detect insider trading (since financial disclosure reports are not available online)

That's only for staff. The reports for Congress members are still required to be available online. They are here [1].

[1] http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial.aspx

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