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Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

Nancy Pelosi’s story is her husband does the stock trading without her involvement (or even her knowledge prior to her regular reports to Congress about trading activity). If true (and assuming she’s not giving privileged info to her husband), that means no insider trading.

Having said that, I really think Congresspeople should be prohibited from trading in individual stocks entirely, and restricted to just investing in index funds, if for no other reason than the PR problem of congresspeople appearing to profit off of their position.

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I'd like to see them required to make their portfolios open to the public in real time. That way, the rest of us could invest in an index fund based on congressional investments, and share in their success.

That's heavily assuming Congresspeople are successful at investing. Assuming insider trading is still illegal for Congresspeople, you will have a hard time picking between "people not insider trading, good at picking stocks though", "people not insider trading, bad at picking stocks", "people who are insider trading, and actually good at it", and "people who are insider trading, but still make terrible choices".

Good luck.

Most traders suck at trading, if a congress person with no financial history starts beating the market, I’d bet a lot that they’re cheating.

If they're shorting or just holding for a short time it's trading. Otherwise long-term positions are investments.

Wish we could see something like that happen, but you are going to need some representatives to vote against their best interest. Kind of like why run off voting will never see the light of day.

The voted to pass the STOCK act, requiring disclosing these trades within ~30 days

30 days? That's some bullshit. Legislators trading based on closed-doors meetings related to "national security" (covid briefings) or even pending market-moving legislation should be on par with insider trading. It's not, and they will never collectively vote against their interests, to use their information for personal gain.

That is all on the table. The SEC can convict federal government employees of securities fraud for trading on this type of insider info

Ye, that is just a ridiculous excuse. I agree that the option too be tempted should also be removed.

I’m under the impression that representatives are legally incapable of insider trading. Being in the congress privileges them to use the information they hear during speech and debate as they see fit.

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