bingdig

The Chinese government and Chinese firms are often willing to share tons of data with researchers. One of my professors was able to get data on cell phone locations, metadata on all text messages sent and received, and occupations of cell phone holders from the largest telecom co in China for a paper on networks and job mobility.

The main problem is that current antitrust law doesn't clearly prohibit anti-competitive behavior like this. Modern antitrust law has largely been created by judges (often without any economic training) interpreting early 20th century laws. This is a great summary of how regulations could be adapted to stop this sort of activity: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...

In short, competition needs to be increased (i.e. more platforms). For example, Amazon wouldn't be able to pull so many shenanigans if users could export all shopping data to jet.com and easily shop on multiple platforms.

The other solution is updated regulations that follow in the footsteps of historical frameworks of antitrust in industries like utilities where it's accepted that monopolies are efficient, but strict measures are put in place to limit abusing market power.

That's a great idea and something we have in the works!

That's pretty much it, but charts are made with Plotly (R) and then hosted on AWS S3. We embed them in Squarespace code through Amazon Cloudfront to speed things up a bit. There area probably better ways to do this, but we don't know a ton about this so just used the tools we did know about.

Sure, we've gotten a couple requests for this and think it'd be really helpful. State and party affiliation will be up in 1-2 days

Sure, we have a very limited tech knowledge - mostly from statistics and economics - so I'm sure it's not that optimized but was easy for us to get up fairly quickly. Site is hosted on Squarespace and all the data visualizations are created with Plotly (written in R) and hosted on AWS

True although it's not quite that simple. Most senators have less risky portfolios than the S&P 500 with lots of bond ETFs and the like, so that's not a perfect comparison. We're working on creating a risk-adjusted return measure to provide a more accurate comparison.

Yes, that's in the works along with Executive branch data!

Almost all her stock holdings are of RealNetworks, a company she worked for in the 90s and that has been on the decline since the Dotcom bust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cantwell

Hey Alex, it's as accurate as the data the senator's report, but we've noticed a lot of inaccuracies that are later corrected - maybe some haven't yet been corrected?

Two points on that specific trade: 1) stocks include an entire family's holdings, and the 3M position is held by her husband, 2) We have to estimate the value of ranges that are reported, and we've chosen to use the midpoint but the lower end may be more true (e.g. $5,000,001-$25,000,000 is estimated to be $15,000,000)

Here's the link to the original filing (have to accept terms first): https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/view/ptr/0c76c4e6-afb1-4...

All the info is from the senate's personal finance disclosure documents: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/

We're not planning on doing anything right now related to that. But long term when we have some more time it'd definitely be more doable using a service like Alpaca

If you're interested in politics and transparency, we're looking for help over at https://www.govtrades.com

Yes, that's definitely on our road map. Think it would be super interesting to see links between stock holdings and legislation (as well as data on lobbying)

Very cool! Did not know about that early requirement but definitely would make things much easier for everybody.

Hey everybody,

Thanks for checking out our project that aims to increase transparency and accountability for politicians deciding to trade individual stocks. We're still early on and implementing lots of improvements so any feedback would be extremely appreciated.

If you think it's cool and would like to contribute your time or money, check out the Contribute section on the site. Thanks!

Loften

Thanks for the suggestion, we're planning on starting that up soon. Give the newsletter a subscribe if you'd like to receive updates/summaries as soon as they start: https://www.govtrades.com/subscribe

Thanks for letting me know, we're getting a ton of traffic and working on increasing stability / speed.

You might feel even worse when you learn that she's faced continued losses since the Dotcom bubble. Almost all her stock holdings are of RealNetworks, a company she worked for in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cantwell

Totally, that should be up within the next couple days. You can check out the methodology section for more details, but the data comes from public disclosures mandated by the STOCK Act (and Yahoo Finance for stock prices).

Thanks! I'll reach out once we have v1 completed and are looking to improve the site.

There is a toggle for the S&P500 you can select, but definitely agree that this should show up as a default to make it clear.

One thing we've noticed is that most senators don't beat the S&P500, but the main reason seems to be that they simply have less risky portfolios (e.g. a lot of bond ETFs)

Still a work in progress, but https://www.govtrades.com as a site to easily view stock returns of senators. The goal is to increase transparency of trades and accountability in policymaking as its becoming clearer that senators still leverage non-public information in trading and may be swayed in policymaking based on stocks they own.

(Edited to make link clickable)