Some also clean up by taking huge speaking fees for giving speeches, but only those at the top with heavy celebrity power. Can you usually pull this one off.
What makes you think that?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
The 10th best position was 63% better than the s&p. That’s just a touch better than keeping your money in qqq.
There might be evidence of congressional insider trading but the bare numbers aren’t it. In a population of 540 people you’d probably find similar outliers to what that article outlines.
The key thing is that of 100 trading members of Congress -of which not one (I believe) is a professional, full-time stock trader — 33% beat the SPY, and that this has been consistently true… the average professional, full-time trader can’t consistently do that.
You might not see evidence of fire, but I definitely see evidence of smoke.
But more importantly your understanding of how trading is judged is flawed. It is trivial to find a population of traders that includes 33% of them that beat the market last year. In fact you can do so going back every year through time.
What is hard (but not impossible) is to find a single trader who has done that consistently for many years. That’s because beating the market isn’t interesting, it’s beating it on a risk adjusted basis which is.
In fact your linked article hints at this. The most active traders in Congress _under_ performed the markets.
There simply isn’t evidence in aggregate that Congress people get market advantage through information only they have.
Yes, you can cherry-pick a population that doesn’t have insider information where 33% beat the market in any given year, but you wouldn’t expect that same population to consistently beat the market, year over year. In fact the whole argument for index funds is that, in aggregate, no one, including professional traders or anyone else without unfair market advantage, consistently and reliably beats the market itself over the long run. But it seems here’s a population that both inarguably has insider information and where 33% does consistently beat the market over and over, year after year.
Lack of evidence also simply isn’t particularly relevant, as the point isn’t to convict the legislator — who has the power to ensure such evidence isn’t available, and even if it were that it wouldn’t represent a crime, and even if it did that they wouldn’t be punished, etc — but instead to convince the voter to consider whether or not their vote should go to someone who disagrees with the notion that Caesar must be beyond reproach.
Every other congress person would have been better off in an index fund as expected. Its easy to write dramatic headlines about Congress people trading, and there are very good reasons that they shouldn't (it influencing their votes is top of that) but there is very little evidence of any significant information advantage in the trading positions or returns of congress people.
they get rich the old way, literal bags of money. you cannot win a big construction job without bags of money that go from the engineer to the govt inspector, then the inspector to the mayor, then to the governor. if you did up anything paid by tax, you will find that foundations are always missing several meters of concrete that are in the plan and paid for.