Nancy Pelosi's Husband Buys Microsoft Ahead of Big Govt Contract | Hacker News Reader

Nancy Pelosi's Husband Buys Microsoft Ahead of Big Govt Contract

thestreet.com

37 pointsdisgrunt29 comments

I think all elected US Reps, Senators, VP+POTUS, appointed Federal Judges should have their investments held in blind trusts, and this should be a statutory requirement for holding these offices.

Hard for me to see whether or not this was corruption or insider access. But holding assets in trusts would eliminate the suspicion along with any actual corruption.

Elected officials in the US are basically all corrupt because they take bribes ("campaign support") from the rich and do their bidding. (Princeton study.) Popularity, advertising, and manufactured sentiment are bought with this dirty money.

The only way to fix this is separating church and state and money and journalism.

A better way than a popularity contest is to do as the ancient Greeks by selecting public administrators at random from a trustworthy, competent group of people who serve for a limited term, like jury duty.

What about the president appointing children and in-laws to White House positions? Or worse, previous "business" associates that provably lack merit?

Edit: excuse my whataboutism. However, if this were a republican it wouldn't even be newsworthy at this point.

I've been working on a web dashboard that estimates the trading returns of U.S. Senators, based on their disclosed trades: https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/senatetrading

It's worth noting that members of Congress are given a 45-day window before they are required to disclose any new stock transactions.

estimates the trading returns of U.S. Senators

I'm curious: what goes into that estimation?

Seriously, why are congresspeople and their close family even allowed to trade public equities.

Because otherwise the savior to half of Americans would have no reason to become president, duh!

I think it would better to say that 1/2 of America was looking for someone who was anti establishment. You could have put Mr. Potato Head up against Clinton in 2016 running the same platform and would have gotten a similar outcome. It seems 1/2 the country feels that it was about a specific person as opposed to a outrage against the corruption and degradation of America. Trump was merely the wearer of that mantle, he was not the creator of that movement, he simply did a good job of molding it.

They proceeded to vote for him again, in greater numbers, the next time around, with Hillary Clinton nowhere in sight.

Against someone who'd been at the highest levels of government for...40, 45 years? He was equally establishment to Hillary - but I think being President lowered the anti-establishment credibility for Trump, leading to a big part of his loss.

Perhaps. But it seems to undercut your thesis that it was about that one specific person. You'd need to expand the thesis at least enough to make it about these two specific people.

Which is a bit difficult to swallow. He had a near-unanimous approval rating among his partisans, comparable to the partisan approval rating of his very popular predecessor. I wouldn't go so far as the "savior" insult by the OP, but I don't really think it can be held that his popularity was solely about rejection of another candidate.

Oh, I think he was popular in his own right. I do maintain a large part of his popularity and success in both elections (yes, even 2020 where he lost) was about rejection of the establishment in general, which yes, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton both represented.

You can make the same argument about Biden/Dems. It seems both party supporters are unwilling to see what the other side is coming from.

While it makes sense to bar congresspeople from trading (IMO), this article is wildly misleading.

The article's outrage depends on the reader not understanding how options work. The options contract was purchased in February 2020, more than a year before it was exercised. It's also not stated when the calls expired.

There's no doubt that congress uses their information to place favorable trades in the market, but this article is just manufactured outrage to get more clicks.

TheStreet.com is misunderstanding how options work? Okay. Let me explain it for you. A government contract takes a while to secure. A year long process wouldn't be out of the ordinary. So Pelosi's husband buys a $10M option early in the process and keeps tabs. As the contract goes public, he executes his options with an already profitable strike price, making approximately $1.1M in the process.

> The options contract was purchased in February 2020, more than a year before it was exercised. It's also not stated when the calls expired.

They expired 2021-03-19 [1].

[1] https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate_member/Nancy%20Pel...

While I disagree with your opinion, as I think it is a symptom of a broader issue, your explanation about the unclear options and outrage manufacturing is spot on.

It’s crazy to me that congress doesn’t have more restrictions on trading given their power and information about the markets. Interns at an investment bank are more restricted in their trading.

Does anyone know how we know these were options trades? From the screenshots of the raw data I’ve seen it’s not clear to me how options are differentiated from a market purchase of the same equities.

Options trades make it less conspicuous.

Waiting to execute would only make the transaction in question more valuable and the ill-perceived gains worse.

I’m not wondering why they used options, but how we know they used options. (The screenshot shown just shows the stocks, but I’ve seen it reported elsewhere that they were options so I don’t doubt it, just wondering where the source of that is)

You can see the options purchases here [1]. They purchased options three times in February 2021, with an expiration of 3021-03-19, with strike prices of $130 for two of the purchases and $140 for the other.

https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate_member/Nancy%20Pel...

EDIT: Typo! That should be February 2020, not 2021! Thanks to jfengel for catching this.

That’s what I was looking for, thanks!

February 2020, no?

The headline is misleading. The stock was acquired via exercising call options that were originally bought in Feb 20, 2020 for a strike price of 130.

Amazing deal, but does it prove he was acting on insider information?

The government contract was publicly announced on March 31. Government contracts usually take a long time to secure. How is this misleading? Pelosi's husband buys an option a year in advance?

The winner of the contract was publicly announced on March 31. It was publicly known that the military was seeking someone to contract with much earlier. I believe they put out their public request for proposals sometime in late 2019 or early 2020.

This was after they had done a test VR program in 2018 with Microsoft.

It does not take any kind of insider knowledge to figure out that Microsoft is going to probably be the top contender to win when you consider that the system will involve a lot of cloud and other back end services (so Microsoft, Google, or Amazon), Microsoft had already won a big contract over Amazon to provide cloud services to the Pentagon, and that Microsoft already did the 2018 VR test contract which presumably the military was happy enough with to go on and ask for bids for a full system.

Can you provide any citations to support your assertion that there was no insider knowledge? Such as all this apparent public information regarding this program?

That Microsoft won the 2018 contract to build prototypes of IVAS was mentioned in most stories about the new contract for the production systems. Here's one [1]. That Microsoft won a big contract to provide the military with cloud services in 2019 is also mentioned in that same story, and was all over the news at the time, as was Amazon's suing to try to overturn that contract.

It was publicly known that the prototypes were delivered and underwent extensive testing in 2019, and officials said they were anticipating the final product being fields in the fourth quarter of FY21 [2]. They were still undergoing testing in the second half of 2020 [3].

Another thing to note is that the article makes much of Microsoft stock going up 11% from the time the time the stocks were bought to some unspecified time after the contract was announced.

But if you look at other tech stocks, such as Google, Apple, and Facebook, they all follow about the same patter as Microsoft: from March 19 (when the Pelosis exercised their options) to March 31 (when the contract was announced) they were roughly flat, and then within a few days of the contract being announced were up ~10%.

This suggests that the stock movements after the time the options were exercised were because of general movements in tech stocks and had nothing to do with the contract.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/31/microsoft-wins-contract-to-m...

[2] https://www.army.mil/article/230034/soldiers_test_new_ivas_t...

[3] https://breakingdefense.com/2020/10/from-frankengoggle-to-ba...

HN: "Ban congress from trading."

This is so short-sighted.

Congress isn't even the issue, it's the ridiculous wealth inequality.

We literally can't compensate the most important public servants enough.

Let's say personal wealth had a cap at $1,000,000,000, and the most successful public servant (president after long terms in Congress, Supreme Court judges) could reach that via compensation over say 60 years.

What then?

Edit: To address the expected HN response: "But tax shelters!!!... Or "wealth safe havens"..."

Great! Let them migrate there and doom their future generations.

Bezos will make more money while I write this comment than the president will earn all year. Give me a break.

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