Show HN: Tracking stock trading by US Senators | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tracking stock trading by US Senators

quiverquant.com

119 pointsgreatwave135 comments

There have been two big Show HN threads about this project already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728049

The purpose of Show HN is to share and discuss what one has built. It's not in that spirit to keep returning to the well with new and sensational instantiations of the same thing.

Also, deleting and reposting, which has been happening here, breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Similar to https://senatestockwatcher.com, posted on HN last month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834524

Same data source?

Recommendation: Show the returns for each senator with the S&P 500 and Berkshire Hathaway performance as reference lines.

I'd be interested to see the senators who have a better track record than Buffett while in office.

Better returns alone aren't indicative of out-performance. What you would want to look at instead of returns is the Sharpe ratio of Hathaway and the market vs each senator. The Sharpe ratio is the excess return (return minus the risk free rate, usually the yield on a 3 month T-note), divided by the volatility of the excess return.

Another metric to look at would be each senators beta exposure and their R2: what percent of their returns are generated by their market exposure.

Wouldn’t the significance of that depend on the time window? If you had an end of first term senator right now, the S&P is up 37.8% over 5 years, while BRK.B is only up 22.3%. Even over a longer period, some proportion will do better than Buffett just randomly.

https://g.co/kgs/RPhfLF

Not A relevant comparison. The returns and available opportunities for someone investing hundreds of billions are very different from someone investing thousands or single digit millions.

Yes! Such a shame to not have this data visualized and filterable. Such an interesting dataset! Anyone with mad matplotlib / ggplot skills? :)

Please don't mess with the browser default scrollbar (in my case, the scrollbar is not visible and page content gets cut off). Thank you.

This is more list of each stock transaction by a US senator by date.

I would show all of the senators line by line sort by name with a summary of: how many transactions,total min-to max, last updated, party.

Clicking on the senator would show all transactions by date for that person.

Right now it's more of a data dump.

Here, I made a quick dump of this data pivoted by Senator/Date/Side into Perspective, a wasm pivot-table project I work on:

https://bl.ocks.org/texodus/8fe1596e298720dff9e1051668e240ce

Kelly Loeffler clearly does hft part-time

More like he's doing pretty big orders (i.e. ICE bought at high $20m volume)

Looks like the data may be coming from https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/

IANAL but I’d tread carefully given the language around not being used for commercial purposes

How exactly can the SEC prove that someone used that site for commercial purposes?

Again definitely not a lawyer but I’d imagine advertising an ETF or selling a subscription to an email list based on these trades (both ideas from this thread) would be pretty clear violations.

"Fun" idea. Would love to see an ETF based around this too.

A Democrat and a Republican ETF? See which one performs better?

My hypothesis is that you'd see identical performance, but I'm a cynic.

Great idea ha

If anybody has some relevant experience and wants to collaborate, hit me up! Been kicking around this one for a while now..

Couple things.

The "no commercial purpose" restriction is going to create a lot of regulatory push-back on any ETF marketed that way. Part of me thinks a sufficiently motivated group could mount a legal attack on that rule, but that would be expensive unless you got some public interest group on your side.

Since the STOCK Act was passed, the alpha in these trades has basically evaporated [1]. I think if you looked carefully, you could find some alpha in the industry tilts, as trades in sector ETFs attract far less scrutiny and laws have a tendency to affect industries as a whole. I haven't checked myself.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fire.12180

A party marker (Dem/Rep/Ind) would have been useful. Also not having a scroll bar feels strange. Also does it include purchases made through mutual funds?

Filters by all of the different fields would be useful, too.

I’m pretty sure this also includes stock trades on behalf of senators, so also includes those carried out by a trust, not under the control of the senators themselves. I feel the data isn’t useful unless it’s clear which senators are making their own trading decisions, and which aren’t

Is this completely impossible to track in practice? I would imagine so.

We know from recent viral claims about senate stock trades that people creating and spreading online conspiracy theories don't care about details like whether the senators actually had any involvement in the trades, nor do most mainstream media outlets, and I suspect they're likely to be the main user base of a tool like this unfortunately.

Where does this data come from?

How /where does one get the data source?

Seconding this question. Setting a Cron job to email daily and weekly stock changes would be fascinating.

Hey, I built something similar to this for large options/insider movements.

https://unusualwhales.com

Here's the twitter, https://twitter.com/unusual_whales

Very cool. Where is the data coming from?

nit: clicking on the date column sorts alphabetically on the text of the date, which is not useful. I am aware the default state is sorted in reverse chronological order by date, but it is not possible to go back to this state after sorting on any column.

How do trades get mapped back to individuals? Is this possible for anyone’s trades?

I thought senators used blind trusts. I guess some don't?

I don’t think they’re required to. It’s a sign of trust if a politician places their personal business interests into blind trusts but many like Trump haven’t. Legislators are, however, exempt from some portion of insider trading laws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com