The issue, as you imply, is that in a bull market people lose almost all ability to exercise reason and view the opportunity cost of capital as the S&P.

But a lot of hedge funds aren't running high levels of beta, and investors in their funds don't demand that (unf for some hedge funds, who demanded low vol and then went into index funds when beta did well).

And, ofc, most equity hedge funds have had very strong performance. All the Tiger group hedge funds have private companies, everyone owns tech companies, you are even seeing value hedge funds in FAANG stocks...it is quite something.

I would agree that options look suspicious, even if they are not "short dated out of the money" types.

But mega cap stocks are lot harder to manipulate than some tiny obscure company.

I think I read that Barack Obama put all his savings into government bonds while he was in office, which is admirable and maybe it would be good to mandate high level people all do that.

But if we don't have such a law, it doesn't seem too far out if they own the same big companies that almost everyone who invests in the stock market does.

Before accusing Mr. Pelosi, at a minimum, I think it would be relevant to check how much different his investment returns were from an index of the entire stock market.

I think there have been Republicans that were overzealously accused of insider trading during the beginning of the pandemic too. I forget who, but there was a fuss made about several of them and Matthew Levine dissected some of the claims in his column and didn't think there was much there.