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Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

I have some play money in the $NANC Democratic Whales ETF [1] that "invests in equity securities purchased or sold by Democratic members of Congress and their spouses". It's up 23% YTD and is beating the S&P500. Incept date is roughly 18 months ago... I wonder if the greater attention brought to their financial activities is prompting this move? The cynic in me is disappointed because it could mean the end of my corruption-fueled beer money gravy train while their activities continue in a more clandestine fashion.

As an aside: this post is not meant as a partisan criticism. I don't invest in the Republican equivalent $KRUZ because last time I checked it wasn't doing as well as $NANC.

[1] https://www.subversiveetfs.com/nanc

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I have always wondered how this would perform. The caveat in my mind has been that there is a (significant?) lag between when the trade is made, and when it must be reported. If there is a strong buy/sell signal, I have assumed it would be cold by the time I had access to that information. Also thought a limitation of the STOCK act was that partners (?) did not have to report their data, so a savvy representative could hide their trades through direct family.

It would be fun to compare the two parties portfolios. Are there ideological companies which are helping/hurting the overall performance? One group is better at timing?

There can be a lag, but not always. Sometimes it’s just a day or so between trade and reporting. Seems like one way to derisk would be to evaluate the time between trade and reporting plus whether anything significant has happened in that timeframe.

For example, Senator buys a stock, stock jumps and plateaus a week later, buy is reported a month later would mean don’t add this to ETF.

I thought they have 60 days to report trades [1] and there are a bunch of stock-based investments that explicitly don't require reporting (EIF's)? Sure, if somebody decides to voluntarily file on day 1, or buy stock "raw" that's cool, but in general there should be quite significant lag or gaps (to the point where short/medium-term there's no signal basically).

[1] https://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/files/docume...

You’re right that 60 is the limit, but many people file them much sooner.

That layers on a lot of complexity onto the idea of “mimic Congress stock trades”.

Now I have to decide if their hot tip hit or not. Was it a long term play? Does the committee decision get published in five weeks, so they wanted to move now?

I am sure there is signal worth exploiting, but an index fund still seems the more appropriate strategy without significant development on how to follow their moves.

18 months is nothing though, a true statistical analysis would look at all of the stocks held by Congress members for decades, if that data is even available.

As a counter-point, $QQQ is also up 23% YTD and seems to track a similar up and down as $NANC. People primarily investing in tech are getting tech returns.

Most of the returns for both are from $NVDA, which is up 172% YTD.

If one party is doing worse and the other is doing better that could be a sign that there's not much to it. They're generally going to have access to similar information/groups/etc. Otherwise a theory that one party is "better at corruption" vs "if you grab subsets of people at random some of the sets will be above-average" is dubiously-supported.

https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-to-invest-like-members-of-co... Per this, KRUZ is lagging the S&P 500 YTD.

And in fact the case it makes is actually less convincing? "In total, 37 members of Congress beat the S&P 500 in 2023, according to stock and options data company Unusual Whales." 37 members of congress is a small subset.

NANC so far is tracking the NASDAQ very closely. I wonder if it's just overweighted by Pelosi's holdings (really her husband who's a sophisticated investor).

Edit: It might just be better to buy a NASDAQ index fund. NANC expense ratio is 0.75%, double that of most index funds. Then again NANC doesn't have as much history.

> really her husband who's a sophisticated investor

It's not hard to be a sophisticated investor when your spouse is one of the decision-makers influencing major stock movements - a la CHIPS Act.

It would be naïve to believe spouses never discuss pending legislation that might financially benefit them both.

An interesting corollary to outperforming the market long term being difficult is that underperforming the market (ignoring transaction costs) is also difficult. If you could consistently pick bad stocks then buying everything else would outperform the market.

So sophisticated on its own doesn’t imply consistently outperforming the market. It does imply variance and thus windows where they will outperform the market even if they preform poorly long term.

Yeah, Warren Buffett compared to the Pelosis. Nancy Pelosi does this as a part-time job and kills it while simultaneously fulfilling her primary duties. We should be grateful that she didn't decide to get into managing a fund.

This is hilarious, thank you for brightening my day with your humor.

I never understood the obsession with Nancy Pelosi specifically (not by you, but by the people who named that ETF and all of the news headlines) in the context of senate trading.

Her recent returns are high, but they’re right up there with several other Republican and Democrat lawmakers: https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1742207287966777673

It’s even stranger that inception date of the $NANC ETF was after she announced she was stepping down as Democratic Party leader.

I guess the name triggers controversy, so the people pushing these products use whatever sells.

Yeah, collecting fees is easy money.

I assumed it was because she was speaker at the time at least when this popped off recently.

It's due to her specific comments as Speaker of the House when leading a vote to dismantle prohibitions established during the Obama admin.

> when asked whether lawmakers and their spouses should be prohibited from trading stock while in Congress, Pelosi said, “No,” adding that “this is a free market.”

https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-86...

It's also because her family profits disproportionately:

> Pelosi's husband, investor Paul Pelosi, frequently trades significant numbers of stocks. With her husband's assets considered, Pelosi ranks among the wealthiest members of Congress, an Insider analysis found.

https://www.businessinsider.com/we-are-free-market-economy-p...

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