Does a "Congress tracker fund" make money? What with all the rumoured insider trading ...
* Congress members don't get paid much and like money.
* They are often old with healthcare issues. Their govt health plans are not great.
* They maintain two residences, one in DC and one in their home state. AOC rents an apartment in NYC that she never lives in and one in DC. This is a huge expense.
Closing this privilege might have other unintended effects... Only the very wealthy can afford to be in Congress.
> Congress members don't get paid much and like money.
They're paid $174,000 per year. [1] That's 3–4x the median US salary. I know it's not, like, lucrative, but if they wanted a lucrative salary they should have gotten a different job!
> They are often old with healthcare issues. Their govt health plans are not great.
Fix the government health plan. Or better yet, make it a public health plan available to everyone!
> They maintain two residences, one in DC and one in their home state. AOC rents an apartment in NYC that she never lives in and one in DC. This is a huge expense.
There are only 541 of these people (plus aides, etc). The government should have an official building for sitting Congresspeople to live in. Like a dorm, but for electeds!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaries_of_members_of_the_Uni...
They could also vote themselves a higher salary, but I guess they realize that would be very unpopular with the general public who, for the most part, get paid far less than politicians. The complaint essentially boils down to spoiled brats whining about wanting to be part of the economic elite. For most of the public, this complaint falls on deaf ears, particularly when it's coming from people who already have a great deal of power and are insulated from the realities of life experienced by most of the people they're ostensibly meant to be representing.
"Boo hoo, I already earn 3-4x more than most people in my state and belong to an elite class of policy makers but I'm so impoverished and oppressed because the billionaires have bigger houses than me :("
Honestly more insufferable than Marie Antoinette.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
> We find no evidence of superior investment performance whether we look in aggregate or at Senators specifically accused of informed trading. Over a six-month horizon, stocks bought by House Members underperform on average by 26 basis points, while stocks sold underperform by 11 basis points.
They do well. Generally, retiring their tenure wealthier than their congressional salary would allow at a 100% savings rate.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381613000194
> For all trades reported electronically and on paper, the buys and sells have the same pattern; they underperform slightly for the first few months and then outperform the market after 150 days by less than 1 percent, which is not statistically significant. Otherwise, the returns of the buys and sells appear to be relatively random.
> The results show that neither Democrat nor Republican senators are especially skilled at picking stocks to buy.
https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2020/04/us-senators-stock-pi...
The holdings and advanced metrics are behind a paywall (apologies in advance).
Presumably because they're on different committees. Or have different friends.
Just like existing law, pending legislation is too vast for any one person to know it all.
I haven't checked the NANC holdings, but her Microsoft position has definitely been carrying our Nancy Pelosi Strategy on Quiver.
You can see the backtest performance here, but the holdings and advanced metrics are behind a paywall (apologies in advance): https://www.quiverquant.com/strategies/
As others have pointed out, there is a delay between when the trades are made and when they are disclosed and our strategy is able to act on them.
However, this is somewhat countered by the fact that politicians tend to hold stocks for long periods of time.
There are definitely some examples of politicians trading a stock right before a massive market moving event, but I think they are generally looking at a longer time horizon when they are investing.