Unusual Stock Trading by Whales in US Congress
unusualwhales.com
unusualwhales.com
> Congressman Gottheimer is absolutely an incredible options trader. He’s been selling calls at peaks on $MSFT all 2021, & seemingly buying back the contracts on dips. This in blocks of $250,000 - $5,000,000, which is incredible size given the amount of $MSFT shares he owns. For ex, on 02-12 he sold 500k $MSFT $160 strike expiring 06/18/2021. On that same day, he bought deep ITM calls of $1M-5M at $145 expiring 03/19/2021. The whale caught both of his movements as well.
This is fucking unreal.
That would surely be a problem for some individuals. But I don't think it's a systemic problem. We only need to find 0.00013% of the US population to fill the Senate and House together; surely there are that many people who are both competent and willing to put the public interest ahead of their own.
When the public was angry, Congress passed the STOCK act. After the news cycle was over, they repealed disclosure unanimously.
Politicians already long on certain stocks can also profit from legislation that they are passing. Being privy to insider info which leads to continuing to stay long a stock is an advantage that wouldn't be detected by just sharing recent trades.
In addition to trying to eradicate insider trading - just shedding light on existing holdings by US office holders will have a huge cleansing effect that will go a long way to showing potential biases/conflicts of interest.
The only practical solution is having less centralisation of power, so no-one can easily manipulate the market.
It's not just Nancy Pelosi, most people in her position would do that. The position of power corrupts people.
Trades could be scrutinized for insider trading by both the SEC and independent traders/firms, just as there are independent services scrutinizing the crypto blockchains.
Insider trading could then even plausibly be legalized by eliminating the advantage of insider trading (it'd have to be based on a lot of study of the data). If we (or other funds) can setup triggers to act on the trades of insiders as soon as they hit the wire, the market will move against them, and we can also share arguably the same advantage by doing so.
People should not be able to make bets on matters over which they secretly control the outcome.
That means any federal official should have their investments behind a blind trust of some sort, no exceptions.
Are federal representatives immune?
Maybe we should use sortition then instead of elections? What could be more democratic than random average people (meeting some criteria) taking a turn at the wheel?
Granted, neither do a significant percentage of the currently serving congress if current policy is anything to go by.
Some people actually care.
I don't like this corruption, but there are many worse things our rulers could do.
This article isn't even about self-serving decisions that may benefit politicians down the road...it's about politicians who are actively using politician-privy inside information for short term profit at the expense of their constituents. But hey let's keep crying about orange man bad!
This is a closed system, and most are not allowed anywhere near the control room.
It, including these trades, is working as intended.
You can view the US in a lot of cynical ways but it was not created as a vehicle to allow the wealthy to continue to gain wealth at the expense of the poor. Insider trading between congressmen using their posts to fleece the public was never an intent of the government.
Pelosi's husband has been very bullish for a long time on Tesla, Apple & tech in general I do believe.
Gottheimer did what I think is a Bull Call spread which means in February, after a crazy run up in market prices in January, he bet that MSFT would go up a little more but would eventually come back down or at least trade sideways & not go over $160 by 6/18. If he sold his ITM calls before March or in early March, he probably did good. If he held on to them until closer to the 19th, he might have got crushed. This doesn't say when he sold. A lot of people argued stocks were overbought after January. Also, if he owns a large share of MSFT it's common to sell calls when you want to keep your shares but think the price is at the top or there is a lot of volatility that will soon go away. It's a way to earn some income without selling.
- None of this is financial advice & I'm fairly ignorant on this topic.
I'm curious where you are reading about Paul Pelosi's stock picks. Regardless, so what? He has no business owning and/or trading shares of companies the person he shares a bed with has influence over.
I have no position on your 2nd sentence. I agree in philosophy but acknowledge the details are complicated.
Even if you take a pretty hard-line attitude about members of Congress being prohibited from doing things like trading their own portfolios, it's hard to make a cogent argument that Paul Pelosi, who is by all measures a private citizen, should be restricted from trading specific stocks.
The honest way to see if politicians get an outsized return from this type of trading is to run a backtest, with appropriate hedges where you buy whenever anyone buys and sell whenever anyone sells and hold for a medium amount of time (3-6 weeks seems reasonable). unusualwhales know this so the fact that this sort of analysis is missing is telling. In particular, note how they provide stats for what the trading trends are, but not for the outsized performance.
The charts at the end of the article are a lot less impressive and they don't obviously look better than random.
The fact that he appears to trade mostly $MSFT while also being a former MSFT Executive and seems to be extremely accurate in his options trading of that $MSFT, only really adds to the extreme suspiciousness.
Is there no entity that even just tries to keep tabs on or possibly investigates these people, let alone charge them with crimes where appropriate? It seems that where there is smoke … and fire … there may actually be fire.
[1] https://www.nj.com/politics/2019/07/the-richest-new-jersey-m...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/richest-member-congress-state...
well there's this thing called the IRS that seems to spend most of their time auditing random citizens when the numbers they submit on their tax forms doesn't match the numbers the IRS already calculated on their side. maybe we could streamline that absolutely ridiculous process & their efforts could be used elsewhere
How quickly are these trades made public? Maybe we should just copy the congress people's trades and make some profit ourselves :P
The problem with Pelosi and others is that the money comes from abusing their power, and is in effect taken from other investors.
What kind of attitude is that? If you have savings, one seeks a return on said savings by investing them. That's perfectly normal and rational behavior at all wealth levels.
Say you have $100,000 in the bank, and you want to spend $10,000. What's the best use of that money? For a normal self-interested person, a rational use would be to invest in whatever will give the largest return, in order to have enough money for living expenses, retirement, children, whatever.
Now, say you have $100 million, and you want to spend $10 million. What's the best use of that money? Seeking a purely financial return is completely pointless. It will have absolutely no impact on your life or future, or those of the people you care about. So as a person with a normal amount of self-interest who also cares about other things in the world, the most rational behavior would be to donate it to a cause you care about, or start some purposeful organization, or anything that will have a positive impact on something or someone you value. At this level of wealth, just making more money has no positive impact on anybody, even yourself.
I guess it's possible that Pelosi is saving up in order to start a SpaceX competitor or buy an NBA team or something once she leaves Congress, but she's 81 so that seems unlikely.
"All wealth levels" are not the same.
How much money is enough if you already have $100M and to gain more, you have to manipulate and cheat?
But even without changing the question, $100M invested in a very low risk manner will generate considerable cash flow (if you regularly take some profits). So without even spending your "savings", you can live very comfortably.
However, a special thing happens when you are high net worth. You suddenly have a lot of lenders begging to loan you money at very low interest rates. They need a place to put money, and they know you have assets to cover any loan they might give you. So you, the wealthy individual with $100M in assets, CAN still go buy nice stuff even if your cash flow from your investments isn't huge.
Honestly, unless you just need to show people how much money you can drop because you're so rich you don't care, you don't actually have to spend any of your money to live bigly.
(I'm not endorsing this, I'm just saying these are the rules of the game that's been set up)
And to answer your second question - not quick enough for the public to act on it.
I am not against non politician people having tons of money. I am against politicians getting rich using insider trading. And the same politicians also accusing their political opponents of doing the very thing they are doing themselves - even more. Hypocrisy and double standards is what makes me disgusted.
There's not a single profession I can think of where someone would gladly be working when they are 80 years old. House and Senate needs term limits. 8 years max. No one should be allowed to become a life long politician and get rich off of it.
But unfortunately, what we want is different from what we get. There's no way these politicians will pass bills to limit their own terms. These people convince the ordinary people that they are all moral and care about them. But meanwhile they are getting rich off of public's trust in them.
Every day I become more and more convinced that all politicians are basically the same - chasing self-interests, power, and prestige.
[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/income-inequality-in-califo...
It’s easy to have low inequality when everyone is very poor like West Virginia.
They traded deep ITM calls 4 months out for deeper ITM calls 1 month out. My guess is that this particular trade is part of a risk management strategy, not an adjustment based on insider information.
The primary concern here is whether or not this influences their decisions when it comes to governing, whether they choose the option that is most profitable rather than best for their country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Arguments_for_...
First of all, Congress passed a stimulus bill on Dec 21, the day before her husband bought those calls. Any 5% gain over the next couple of days or so is for more likely in response to that, and in anticipation of Trump signing the bill soon, than it due to Pelosi changing her mind about some possible future stimulus that hasn't even started being negotiated yet.
Second, the 5% "rally" for AAPL only lasted a week. TSLA's rise lasted longer, but it was rising before this. The article doesn't say anything about whether or not they actually exercised their options to buy the stock, and then sold it to actually profit. If they didn't, then this "rally" had no real effect on them.
Third, looking at other tech stocks, GOOG pretty much did nothing around or for a while after Dec 22. AMZN fell for a day or two, spiked up, came back to around what it was. FB was kind of like AMZN, but the spike was smaller and the fall was deeper. Looking beyond tech stocks, the Dow and the S&P 500 don't show anything happening around the time. Most things continued the trends they had been on before.
That suggests that Pelosi's change of heart about possible future stimulus bills didn't have much effect on most stocks. So why did they buy AAPL and TSLA? Even if they thought there would be an effect and wanted to exploit it, buying TSLA to do so makes no sense. AAPL makes a little more sense, but not much. AMZN or some other company whose products people would actually likely spend stimulus money on would make more sense.
Does anyone know?
Not when said action occurs a week before the Congressional act is announced. Is this HN thread flooded with bots or something? Have never seen this level of sympathy for politicians.
Disclaimer: not American, no strong opinion on these people.
Being a representative isn't supposed to be a "get rich quick" scheme. They already make a lot of money and IMO if they're going to invest in stocks they should play by the same rules as everybody else.
Edit: On second thought, considering how much they can influence stock prices, maybe they should have stricter insider information regulations. It's a huge conflict of interest.
For example will a lawmaker holding a large portion of their wealth in Apple shares want to introduce legislation that forces Apple to allow alternative app stores (costing Apple the 15%-30% cut of all the app store sales)?
Within an organization making a decision that advantages oneself is unethical since the purpose of the most organizations is not to fulfill the personal interests of its employees.
It would make some sense to convert all property holdings of a government employee to financial instruments related to the health of the government such as treasury notes. That way their personal interests are at least aligned with those of the government. To the degree that the instruments measure aspects of the government that are not totally aligned with the governed is a problem however.
But even if you're one of those proponents of insider trading, surely this is clearly different and worse than that, because prominent politicians surely have some power to influence winners and losers.
You are right that if the officials actually cared about companies, it would not make sense. I was thinking more like hedge fund-like cold speculation. As people guessed correctly, the point is to make the job very appealing but with little ties to powerful interests. Of course is not a serious scheme, but I'm amused by the concept I guess.
Not that I expect people would be comfortable paying politicians more (see how many complain about e.g. CEO pay) so I guess we are stuck with incentives for corruption instead.
This is not true. It’s very odd to see the kind of right-wing conspiracies based on outright fabrications spread on HN as literal truths. Here is an article from December 22 were Pelosi is calling for more stimulus:
www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/12/22/trump-calls-covid-relief-bill-unsuitable-and-demands-congress-add-higher-stimulus-payments.html
Here is her direct tweet dated 12/22:
https://mobile.twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/134155753573...?
Edit: There are outright lies in the source article. Sad day for HN that the lies are getting so much traction and fact checking with 1st hand sources is getting downvoted.
I also found this article on 2020/12/21 where Pelosi says she wanted more stimulus, but the $600 checks were significant.[1] So it seems all the more unlikely that she said she was against further stimulus at any point on the 22nd.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/nancy-pelosi-wanted-more-600-22542493...
Some democrats were urging her to accept it in October: https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1315078896853843970
The House had passed the HEROES act for additional stimulus in May 2020. The Republican senate refused to even put it up for a vote. She was always for passing of the HEROES act even during this October - December period. She was always pro stimulus.
It's even more odd to see the, "if you disagree you're alt-right/ a Nazi" mentality on HN.
Why does a member of congress need to day-trade stocks, let alone leveraged derivatives? It's absurd.
You believing that "right-wing conspiracies" automatically means ties to "alt-right/Nazis", I think this says more about your personal biases than the person you are responding to.
maybe on that one point, but the fact the democrats trade way more on the markets is not a conspiracy theory, it's an outright conspiracy.
why are you defending these people? because they're democrats on paper?
Stupid question: if you were expecting an upswing in a stock, wouldn't you get the most returns from an out of the money option? For a deep ITM you're paying the same as the underlying stock plus a tiny premium -- you might as well just buy the stock.
Congress insider trading is not new. Peter Schweitzer’s book “Throw all of them out” details them. The book was released in 2011.
How is this an acceptable. Is politicians above the law?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/31/raphael-wa...
The state and large corporate interests in the USA are very tightly integrated and have been for at least an entire generation.
The law doesn't require this of course, but basically all money managers get their insider trading compliance program from the same 3 outside law firms.
Dec 23 Trump announced support for a $2000 stimulus, changing the political calculus, in favor of democrats, who did eventually push through the remaining $1400 in a separate package.
Pelosi's strategic change is not a change that happened in a vacuum. Trump's announcement was all over the news and was the single most important event in the political world that day, not Pelosi's husband buying calls. Contextualizing this event around Pelosi's husband is misleading.
Ok downvote my comment all you want but this is well documented and was less than 6 months ago, and frankly it's surprising that people forgot how impactful this event was. People are still criticizing Biden over the additional check being 1400 instead of 2000.
I'd rather live in a world where reps are squeaky clean. It's much better than one where we make up some rules where people who come right up to the line end up smelling bad, and then everyone is born complaining about the corruption and enduring it with no recourse.
Ultimately it's a rules vs discretion (aka judgement) question.
I don't know if you remember, but the amount of stimulus remained 600, so Pelosi was on money on what was politically possible. The remaining 1400 only was possible after the slimmest of senate majorities after the Georgia runoffs.
[0]: https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/nancy-pelosis-h...
It's USA. Corruption is the norm.
How do you think so many people on government salaries become super rich, whilst supposedly working for the government?
No really, how can we force congress to change the rules so that elected officials can't profit from inside information? Why would they ever vote for such a bill?
It's easy to be a thorough cynic in the modern world, but most people aren't out to con everyone else when they get the chance and, if a spotlight is shone on the problem, will respond that actions should be taken to make things more just.
Here's an article calling out the stock trading specifically around Covid treatment drugs with some congressmen and politicians calling out the behavior:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/aoc-calls-senate-i...
While not entirely related, I remember a study by the U.S. military during the Vietnam war that said the worst performing soldiers were the ones who were patriotic and served due to a sense of duty. I'm simplifying here but the idea was that those were often the first people to feel a sense of entitlement and feel as if because they had good intentions that they were "owed" something.
Belief in governance is cheap and doesn't do much to solve anything. Competency, skills, leadership, those are qualities that result in change... having a good heart and believing in or trying to execute various altruistic ideologies is basically a loser's game.
I'm also not advocating that blindly loyal idiots should be in charge - a good comparison to make is to look at more local governance. On a local level the stakes are much lower so the money being thrown around is far less - this lets people get into politics because they want to make change which is an anomaly at the national level - most of those politicians are there because it's a career and they value preserving that over everything else.
Another decent idea in this direction is term limits but I'm a bit concerned that that might deprive us of competency.
If you are competent, skilled, and a leader, but are not altruistic, you will end up being a very competent, very skilled leader of a burglary operation. ;)
We should expect elected officials to have both. It's not like it's impossible.
> It's easy to be a thorough cynic in the modern world...
Thanks to politicians it's never been easier!
Welcome to the system. This is pervasive in many other aspects as well (court, police, DA, etc).
Maybe an executive order could also prohibit this? I'm not sure.
I don't think this will help. I feel that executive orders are misused and abused today. They are really only only supposed to be executive guidance on how to enforce or implement a law. Instead they are being used as redefining law or even ignoring them.
I'm frankly disturbed that this kind of specific trading by people in power is going on at all. Salaried federal employees above a certain level are strongly encouraged to invest only in generic mutual funds to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. When I look at the above trades I'm not sure whether anything technically illegal occurred but I'd support making all specific trading illegal to avoid even the appearance of unethical behavior. Higher powers deserve to be held higher standards.
That sounds like an excellent idea to me. While in office, can only trade TSP funds, or their rough equivalents outside of TSP. If you wanna sell something that isn't a giant index fund? Do it before you take office.
Then I'd further support that all trading would have to be done via a 10b5-1 plan, with a blackout window of at least 6 months.
No system can prevent humans from exercising their basic instincts, emotions, urges, needs, and wants.
Well, those people profiting off of it would have to vote against each other's interests.
Money wins elections. Not issues, which are just window dressing. The media cartels own your attention for all your waking ours and, as MiB said, while individuals are rational and sensible, people (that is, the voting electorate) are easily scared, easily duped, and increasingly easily controlled.
So it's not just "vote against being rich", it's also "vote to lose the next election".
Liquid democracy is something that can be built from the ground up, and has the potential to deprecate our modern system.
Note that the house majority leader is also one of the biggest winner of these rules not existing.
If only there were more Ron Wydens and AOCs. But you see red states electing nutjobs who barely have high school degrees (Boeber) because they shout the loudest.
Also, one person’s “shouting nutjob with barely a highschool degree” is someone else’s “passionate populist who represents the common people.”
That is what average means.
(Looks like we two are keeping it balanced!)
The same goes for Republican representatives in highly red states.
I have family who just love to complain about what legislators are doing and how they're voting but have not once, ever, actually contacted their representative about these issues. Not once have they actually read the bills and tried to understand them. It's all based purely on whatever news channel they're watching. Yet, they somehow think that through all that complaining they're actually accomplishing something.
I know my family isn't unique in this. I was just talking to a contractor who is doing work on my house that started in on this nonsense.
It got too easy to see who’s flying their private jets and where.
Meanwhile if you travel by car, get bent.
I think we need to acknowledge that, in the same way that the people with the power to stop this are profiting, they are also the people with the power to change who is in power or how they get in power. Elections are not effective ways of changing systemic power structures anymore. Society pretty much needs an overhaul, especially in the face of serious existential risks like climate change or looming military conflicts.
They are neither left nor right. There is a middle elite group that exploits politics on either side of the aisle to maintain power. And that's all it is. And they get filthy rich, but so too does the CCP which is left-wing. Taking advantage of power for personal gain is not an exclusive domain of one wing or the other. At any rate these oversimplified analogies break down among many lines upon closer inspection. There are elite insiders and then there's the rest of us.
> An amendment may be proposed and sent to the states for ratification by either:
> The U.S. Congress, whenever a two-thirds majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives deem it necessary; or
> A national convention, called by Congress for this purpose, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states (34 since 1959). The convention option has never been used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Un...
Who watches the watchmen?
And Democratic party believes that bigger gov't is the solution to many of our problems.
The recent Black Lives Matter protests have taken a far more aggressive turn against systemic issues. Systemic issues such as the economy, the stock market, policing as a whole, and capitalism in its essence. Donating to bail-out funds, joining the protests, increasing awareness in the problems our economic system has created for us without proper good-faith regulations is all helpful.
You can't reform corruption to this level. You need to cut it out and start over.
The industry generally sees it as easier to show compliance by having locked down personal trading by employees.
Usually this takes the form of - ETFs only, pre-clearance required, 30 day holding periods, limited to using only a list of 5 approved brokers.. and sometimes all of the above.
The restrictions apply not just to spouses but to anyone in household, and you have to attest you are reporting any holdings of say.. your parents, if you still live at home.
So the mother of a live-at-home college grad tech support analyst who plugs in phones at a bank has more trading restrictions than senior politicians :-)
And you need to grant them access to the broker data feed and no derivatives.
It's in part why I'm suddenly into crypto.
They only restrict me due to concerns about insider info...and I certainly don't know where bitcoin is going tomorrow based on my decidedly non crypto finance day job
Can we please stop perpetuating the myth that short selling, or holding short positions, is some kind of exotic or shady or villainous activity ?
It's not. Short selling, and the holding of short positions, is value neutral and is part of a healthy properly functioning marketplace.
I don't know what politicians should or should not be doing but a long vs. short distinction is silly.
If they can invest in total market indices while having the ability to control the money supply, even if they can just go long, it doesn't matter.
How about electing honest people, instead of constantly voting for the establishement (w. a few exceptions).
What if we just regulated the 0.01% who's wealth is such that it makes the top elected officials in our country have a seemingly insignificant compensation.
They are plainly there to shove through their friends interests, profit off of insider information, and get out without going to jail. Every single one of them.
Here is, in particular, what they know: We as a whole despise Congress but somehow manage to convince ourselves that, "My representative is the only one who is honest!" so we re-elect them over and over again.
Here is another thing they know: the number of people I know personally who bitch and complain about issues based purely on headlines they've read or heard (note, it's ONLY the headlines. they can't be bothered to actually read the article) is, for me, astounding. In other words; the people don't want to do the work of really educating themselves and the politicians take advantage of that.
Let me say it again. Until we educate ourselves and demand that the people we elect be more accountable to us, the people, then they will. not. change.
If you take the DocID from the XML or TXT files in those sets you can send a request to:
https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/<doctype>-pdfs/<year>/<docid>.pdf
- <year> self-explanatory
- <docid> the DocID from the entries in the XML or TXT files
Example: Nancy Pelosi disclosure/filing on 2021-04-09[1]
[0]: https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/PublicDisclosure/Financi...
[1]: https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/202...
This would be fun to play around with. I wonder if there's a better endpoint to source this from?
https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-extract-tables-from-pd...
https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate/data
Looks like the report gets filed shortly after the trade.
If you had sneaky exclusive access to their trading flow in real time then yeah sure you could copy them and get the benefits of insider trading. (And you might be guilty of insider trading yourself? I'm not sure how the law works.)
If everyone knows Alice is doing insider trading and knows her trades, then when Alice buys X at $10.00, there will probably be other copycats piling into X and driving its price up, so you won't be able to get the same price as Alice, unless you're faster than everyone else.
Since you don't know what the actual inside information is, you don't know if it's still worth it to buy at $10.20, $10.30, etc. Maybe the inside info was only slightly better than expected earnings and the price end up being only $10.05.
This is somewhat exploitable by Alice, she doesn't need insider information anymore, she just has to buy random stock Z and disclose it, watch copycats pile into Z and drive its price up, then sell it back at a higher price.
On the flip side, are there any congresspeople who have publicly put all their assets in a blind trust? Any who have advanced bills requiring this of their colleagues?
The solution to problems like this is elections, and you would think "My opponent is insider trading while I literally can't" would make a great campaign ad.
No, I vote ignorance. Most people don't even realize the current global political landscape is a battle of systems (E.g. Rules Based and China's Belt and Road Initiative).
The idea that we're pawns doesn't cross most people's minds. Though I'd agree it may be willful ignorance as the truth not only hurts but is scary.
Maybe. The fact that two of us here are even discussing it is something. I know quite a few people who feel this way. But it does usually take at least the witnessing of a blatant violation.
At some point I also realized advertisements are purely bribes meant to shackle speech. Once I abandoned ad-funded media, my learning really took off.
Heck, I could cough once for buy, twice for sell. Who's going to surveil me and notice that?
Back when the stock market was founded, it was meant as a means of providing a signal of support for a company. It allowed the company to raise debt or financing based on it's stock price or signal of support. You bought company stock because you believed in the fundamentals of the business and you wanted to support it. Now it's just about how i can sell this stock to the bigger sucker, for more money than i bought it for.
Technical analysis generally uses only publicly available information; it's finding patterns in those publicly available data that can help you make investment decisions.
I'm not saying it's socially useful; just that it is distinct from insider trading.
If they are outperforming this should 100% be remedied but I'd be open if anyone has comments that would contradict this report?
[1] https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/relief-...
[1] https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati...
Did this really harm your confidence in the markets, or did it only harm your confidence in politicians who have been doing this for hundreds of years whether there was mandatory disclosure or not?
Insider trading regulations are based around people feeling willing to use the capital markets at all. People use the US capital markets, so expanding that regulation is not necessary.
For the latter observation, I would like there to be quicker reporting so that we can trade alongside it.
It's not the cheesy logo or the fact that they are ripping off other fintech companies, it's that they are selling get rich quick dreams like a scam artist.
This article is really an advertisement for their services and it's surprising that it went viral here. They are basically encouraging people to try and cash in on criminal financial activity in congress.
I can't put my trust in this site.
In all seriousness, if we are talking about privilege this privilege the ruling elite has to participate freely in insider trading behavior is bonkers. It likely just isn't the politicians themselves. Their staffers, confidants, and so on could all be benefiting.
If Presidents are goaded to put their assets in blind trusts when taking office why shouldn't principal members of the other two branches of governments be obliged to do the same?
Unfortunately, our DOJ has been working on fugazy matters while antitrust laws are ignored and obvious market manipulation offenses by elected officials are of no interes seemingly.
Term limit them.
12 years total Congress in lifetime. That is two full Senate or six House, or combination thereof.
The longer a politician (or bureaucrat) is in a position, the more power they accumulate and the likelihood to forget the purpose of their role.
I mean insider trading should be illegal especially for real insiders. That I am not arguing. The market just seems to easy too spook and not that efficient to me.
Some of the specific cases are compelling but it doesn't seem particularly surprising that one year's worth of relatively spectacular returns in many top sectors results in outperforming the market averages.
There are many many people who far outperformed the market averages by the end of 2020.
As long as we have crooks as our representatives, they will find various loopholes to cheat.
Caesar’s Wife Must Be Above Suspicion.
When we find such folks, since the media won't ask those questions, the constituents must call/write/email their offices and know that they are being watched.
Takeaway: just be rich, and you can do whatever you want.
I personally consider that part of my own portfolio. No par value, sold at a higher price.
> On a whole, Democrats seem to love tech and Republicans seem to love oil and gas.
But I hadn't really thought about the wide-reaching implications until now; perhaps its more than a coincidence that the current cryptocurrency bull run really took off shortly after Biden won the presidential election.
($250k is like $160k take home with her home town taxes. 20/160 = 0.125)
Then there's this:
> Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Mark Green, alone, accounts for 99% of the stock purchases in oil and gas companies like USA Compression and Energy Transfer.
Look this guy up [1]:
> Green rejects the scientific consensus that human activity plays a key role in climate change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_E._Green#Climate_change
HN can't see the forest for the trees.
Trading isn't the issue.
Why are our top elected officials not compensated enough? Income inequality. If it isn't trading, they'll chase Bezos until they "get what they deserve" one way or another.
Exactly, and you had to be really unlucky not to have significant returns over the past year.
Has anyone looked at their managed retirement find lately? I wouldn't be surprised if you see 30% even in a medium-risk fund.