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Comment by Aboutplants | Hacker News Reader

Proposal : A congressman can trade to their hearts content but must publicize their intentions to purchase or sell a stock with a minimum of at least 24 hours. This gives the public the open view of their intentions however they come to that decision, but the open market can then decide how to react to the congressman’s decision before they actually finalize a trade.

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No. They simply shouldn't be able to trade individual stocks. Requiring them to tell the world the exact second they're buying a stock doesn't change that that purchase was made to make money. If you're the elected authority who, by your rule, creates corporate winners and losers, we should not merely have to hope that your rule benefits us more than it does you. The job description is clear - you're a civil servant. If doing your job as a senator is unappealing to you because you can no longer invest in individual companies, then don't let the door hit you on the way out. Goodbye

But they hold influence as congresspeople. Announcing their favor or disfavor for a thing influences people and corporations. The market would swing more from their announcements and citizens would invest or divest along party lines. Neither are good economics.

At minimum they shouldn't be allowed to trade individual stock. I don't think this stops workarounds but it's the least we could do.

That creates more trading opportunities tbh and eventually the market will calibrate. Similar has happened to trump and his tarrifs plus all those truth/xitter messages.

24 hours? Representatives should have similar restrictions as high level leadership of companies. Their trades should be scheduled months ahead of time.

There's no reason to invent new rules here. We already have a process for this: executives of companies are required to set up their trading plans months in advance (at least when it comes to stock in their own companies).

Just require people in Congress to follow the same process, but for any stock, bond, ETF, etc.

Although this sounds like a sensible idea, I think it's impossible to prevent insider trading - if you introduce a rule like this, politicians will just find a middle man or work around it in some other way - the corruption schemes getting more elaborate is the last thing you want.

The goal isn't to make it impossible to do insider trading, it's to set some controls and have consequences when they aren't followed.

The middle man scheme you mention would be illegal under OP's idea. So prosecute everyone involved. The more people involved, the harder to hide it.

Your argument is basically "it doesn't make sense to have murder be illegal because the law won't prevent the bullet from flying."

Yeah, unfortunately.

This is pervasive in China; the politicians kid is the middleman. One child policy, so there's at most one kid -- makes it easy to know who to give the stock tips to.

That should make it incredibly easy to weed out then, surely?

Corruption is not weeded out because no matter how much people complain they WANT the corruption.

Bernie Sanders is not the president of the United States.

> I think it's impossible to prevent insider trading

Sure. It's impossible to prevent all crime. But that doesn't mean that rules and restrictions around what you can and can't do are useless. The existing rules for prohibiting insider trading when it comes to corporate executives work decently well; we should just expand those to apply to people in Congress (and make it apply to all securities for them).

It won't catch everything, but it will help. A lot.

Public service should come with a permanent loss of financial privacy.

Has anyone actually studied their trading activity at a finer grained level? I doubt many of them are day trading, so I think the 24 hour rule wouldn't have much of an effect.

I've made thousands of dollars just by following the Pelosi tracker on X. Most of the time a stock soars just on the effect of a congressman buying that stock.

Just buy QQQ. She doesn't have a magic strategy. In fact, she probably underperforms given how long she is in tech and how leveraged her trades are (people forget she's married to a venture capitalist).

underperforms what? Certainly not the market

What their returns should have been given their leverage.

    > how leveraged her trades are

What does this phrase mean?

The Pelosis use a call option strategy to do leveraged buys for their positions.

That is wild! I cannot believe that is allowed. Retail investors using options is always a "gambling strategy"... or in her case probably _near_ insider information.

... why wouldn't that be allowed? They're basically just doing an options-structured version of buying on margin, which you yourself can do; using options limits their downside risk. What "insider" information are you even talking about?

People keep talking about how wildly Pelosi beats the market. You could beat Pelosi! Just go all-in on NVDA. Max out your margin limit to do it. So long as tech stays on a bull run, you're a genius.

Of course, you'll eventually lose your shirt. This is the problem with "the Pelosi tracker" stuff. Your risk tolerance is not that of the Pelosis: Paul Pelosi has spent decades in venture capital and they've allocated a small portion of their portfolio to very long bets on tech. If tech craters, they're fine. You aren't.

That's the "secret" to their success.

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