Capitol Trades: Tracking Stock Market Transactions of Politicians
capitoltrades.com
capitoltrades.com
There are a couple things on my top dislikes of US politics and not having more restrictions on politicians is up near the top.
I have to follow much more stringent disclosures and controls as part of a large private entity that does investment. It’s absurd that folks making policy, who have a potentially closer ear to the ground are not more restricted.
The 30 days self reporting disclosure period is a joke too. It’s after the fact, has no real penalty for being late and AFAIK they don’t maintain any real restriction lists so it has no impact.
The profits they earn is hardly the issue. The issue is they are motivated to set policy or spend as much govt money in a way that benefits their portfolio.
A politician spending an extra billion of public funding to make (say) a half a million themselves is a real issue.
Have you and if so why not include evidence in your comment that refutes my claim?
>The party of the working man sure has changed in recent years.
Based on what?
joinautopilot.com
So being late a few days is not the end of the world.
Turns out I was wrong and it has been submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682786
Those have been good to copytrade
An example: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...
Anyway check out the symbol: NANC
With that being said- the idea that they're outperforming the market I think has been debunked several times. I'm sure that they're acting in bad faith and believe that they have some kind of precious inside information. But a few different studies have shown that they basically do the same as any group of a few hundred people that pick individual stocks- some outperform, some underperform, and in general their returns are a random walk. See
https://studenttheses.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/20.500.12932/47... "no significant abnormal returns" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4954641 "significantly underperform" https://andy.egge.rs/papers/EggMueller_capitol_losses_jop_20... "between 2004 and 2008 the average member of Congress would have earned higher returns in a passive index fund"
Stick to index funds folks
It pretty much prevents benefiting from "subtle insider" trading via being lobbied by corporate officials or getting any friendly hints from them. The problem with "follow Nancy's trades" idea is that by the time the trade is known, the price has already corrected. The first one to complete the trade is often the only one to collect a significant benefit, the followers get scraps.
And it indirectly disincentivizes owning individual stock because prearranged trade of one stock carries a risk of being screwed by market manipulators, while prearranged trade of a broad index fund is not a problem.
A complete disclosure of all holdings will also be required, so that you can see if they're picking policy to assist their existing portfolio.
https://radiotv.house.gov/house-data/salaries
That's several times over median but many of us on this site make that much or more. More reasonable restrictions would be things like requiring them to use a blind trust, to restrict investments to index funds or managed portfolios, or something.
I think if the only thing that they could invest in was total-market index funds (or something similar), that would not have too much of a conflict of interest. They'd have the incentive to make the entire market happy, not just individual stocks, which benefits nearly everyone.
If the only stock that politicians owned was VTI or something similar, I think most people would mostly be fine with that. That would still have problem in terms of the uneven weighting, but it would certainly better than what we have right now.
Don’t tell that to folks planning to retire soon.
If they are truly people-oriented as they oath when they join public service, why allow them to own stock at all?
I take this to mean you think that civil servants and members of the military should also be barred from holding stocks?
> But isn't that a significant conflict of interest if they are public service employees?
There is no inherent conflict of interest in owning stocks. The risk is when they own (especially if they are heavily invested in) individual stocks. Use a blind trust like I mentioned or disallow holding individual stocks if they want to manage their own portfolio, then they still have a vested interest in the economy (how well businesses are doing as proxied by the stock market) but their conflicts are limited or removed.
The rules for rank and file employees already exist, it's the ones at the top that can flout the rules that are an issue.
You can bring coffee and donuts, those are even specifically called out:
> Modest items of food and non-alcoholic refreshments, such as soft drinks, coffee and donuts, offered other than as part of a meal;
Why not? I've suggested solutions that let them invest without even being aware of what they're invested in or only minimally (index funds, specific portfolios). This resolves the conflict of interest problem while allowing them to still gain the financial benefits of investing some of their money.
Or is the idea that if they choose to work for the government, they need to work until they die.
What about owning any asset class? real estate? is that allowed? Metals?
There's no actual reason a congressperson needs to own stocks. In fact, we should be doing what we can to enforce a certain "Average American"-ness to their lives so they work to improve the lives of the average american.
Personally I would prefer restricting them to SNP500. US does well - they’ll do well.
If we work backwards from the observation that Donald Trump just got elected from his second term and start probing into the whys and wherefores; direct lobbying seems to be the major problem. Politicians stock trading is certainly unseemly but it isn't at all clear whether it is pushing the quality of the decision making in Washington up or down.
I'm intrigued at the extension to the idea that public officials shouldn't own anything at all. What do you want them to do?
No one is saying that public officials should own nothing, but the concern is that if they own stock in an individual company, they will have an incentive to vote to benefit that company to drive up the stock price. For example, if I owned a ton of stock in Lockheed Martin, I might be incentivized to vote to declare a war that isn't necessary in order to get a bump in my income.
This doesn't mean that they actually would do this, it's possible that the politicians would have integrity and vote their actual positions, but I think for things like this the appearance of impropriety is almost as bad as actual impropriety. We need to have some level of trust in our political leaders, and having things that look unseemly is almost as bad as actual corruption.
Even if you could prove that Trump now maintaining his businesses has no effect on his political decisions, it would still be bad, because it still gives an appearance of corruption, and that erodes trust in our institutions.
I don't think most people would have a huge problem with politicians having stocks in broad mutual funds, especially if they don't directly know what's being invested in. This would encourage them to make the entire market grow, instead of just individual stocks.
Or is that not how the markets work?
explained here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/putoption.asp
“a 2012 law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, bars members of Congress and their aides from making investment decisions based on inside information they have access to as part of their Senate work, including both criminal and civil penalties for violations. Legal experts say that determining what information is “nonpublic” can be exceedingly difficult; no one has been successfully prosecuted under the law.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-wont-charge-sen-richa...
If we can't trust the lawmakers, something has fucked up already.
I think we need more transparency, not more restrictions. Trust and Verify.
I think it's amusing that folks think that politicians have any sort of capability to be able to consistently beat the S&P 500.
Are you so sure about that? Presumably tomorrow's > 3% crash will mean we've had more consecutive crashes of note than any other period since the Great Depression.
This is truly one of the most remarkable market downturns in all history, and by all accounts it is only just getting started.
A bull market when we have s&p drops steeper then covid?
And you are aware politicians have insider knowledge, correct? That is how you beat the s&p.
No, this is how low info conspiratorial voters think it works, because their worldview is everything is 1. a conspiracy 2. involves "money" in some basic way they can easily imagine.
Insider knowledge doesn't reliably beat passive investing and why would politicians even have it? You can see what they're voting for by watching CSPAN.
There are many discussions long before you see anything on C-SPAN, and some are top secret.
I'm sure they are in some discussions, I'm sure both staffers and elected officials are in others, and I'm sure elected officials have some without their staff.
> A "top secret business discussion" in Washington, are you kidding me?
There are those, of course; the incredulity you typed isn't evidence otherwise. But I was referring to top secret discussions that affect businesses; for example, the armed services committees have secret meetings about things that greatly affect companies in the defense industry.
There's no conspiracy in acknowledging that politicians sometimes use their influence for personal gain, when it's convenient. That's just human nature.
One thing that happens if you actually watch election results here is 1. the left candidates have more money and 2. it doesn't help.
https://campaignlegal.org/update/congressional-stock-trading...
The reports are public so you can scroll through them, the most common pattern (I'm just eyeballing it I haven't found their download to graph it out properly) looks like they just do bulk reports every 30 days so you actually get a mix of old and new trades in each report.
( based on https://www.capitoltrades.com/trades )
I have no doubt some moves were made before those tariffs, but it seemed it was telegraphed to everyone.
Also, if you look at congresspeople's gains, on average, they are not that great.
Does anyone supply US-POL Dem / Rep as an index tracked ETFs?
This has been a long standing form of “investing”.
See Pelosi’s husband for his track record of “success”.
The services pushing politician trade tracking and ETFs really leaned into Pelosi to capitalize on it.
As the other comment already said, her (more specifically, her husband’s) returns haven’t actually been noteworthy or suspect, it’s just the implication that gets people worked up.
This comment doesn't help. You haven't mentioned another politician, either Republican or Democrat, when you had all the room and time in the world to do so.
This line also depends on the fiction that people think that Pelosi is uniquely trading on the information that she learns at her job, rather than just openly and proudly trading on the information that she learns at her job. Other people being corrupt doesn't make the corruption disappear. It isn't like Democrats are positive numbers and Republicans are negative numbers that cancel each other out. We're not looking for equity in corruption.
The current tariffs policy of Trump's regime could even be a market manipulation for their personal enrichnent: send the stock markets crashing with a very dumb financial decision, buy a lot of stocks when they are low, and right after cancel the dumb decision, and then profit.
They have nuked the SEC for a reason, haven't they?
To follow Pelosi, just look up the public record on the government website. It tells you the date and the product he used. Then just look up the chart for that day and look at the price range.