Nancy Pelosi and the infamous insider trading of Nvidia.
A few weeks before the CHIPS act passed congress in July 2022, Nancy Pelosi made a large purchase of Nvidia shares. This made headlines everywhere as obviously she was going to pass the CHIPS act, obviously Nvidia stands to benefit, so of course she loaded up knowing these things.
But the media, who will readily obscure any nuance that can kill a story, only mentioned that she executed call options to purchase nvidia shares. Which to 99% of the public is technical babble that is ignored.
But what actually happened? Well Pelosi, looking at her trading history, likes to buy deep ITM LEAP calls and hold them to expiry. This means in the simplest terms, that she signs a contract 1yr+ before a date, where she gives herself the option (hence the name) to purchase a set number of shares at a set price. So when Nancy purchased Nvidia shares in June 2022, she had set the contract in motion to do that at least a year prior.
But even worse for the inflammatory story, because she purchased that option over a year prior, and Nvidia was down ~15% in the last year (remember 2022 was a bad year for stocks), she actually would have lost money on the trade.
So here we have the foundational story that set this whole thing is motion, which is based on public ignorance of how stocks and options work, where Pelosi was vilified for a trade she lost money on, because the execution date of a contract she signed at least a year prior happened to be within a few weeks of the CHIPS act.