Capitol Trades: Tracking Stock Market Transactions of Politicians
125 comments
·April 6, 2025infecto
vasco
Agree but in the meantime you have much bigger fish to fry when your president literally pumped two meme cryptocoins. It's like you used to have a house which has a bit of dust and so you're complaining about dusting a bit better in the future, when the current guest just took a huge shit on the floor.
saintfire
I'd argue two dime-a-dozen pump and dumps is dwarfed by the magnitude of issues that letting politicians exploit trading using policy-making.
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.
lazyeye
Nancy Pelosi is worth $200 million is "a bit of dust on the floor"? Her stock-picking record is better than the professional investors despite being very busy with a job in an unrelated field?
Braxton1980
Could it be because her husband runs an investment firm that existed before she had any real power?
fragmede
But what about President Carters peanut farm?
ttyprintk
I haven’t seen Autopilot posted on HN:
joinautopilot.com
mamidon
No joke, I used to work there until they went RTO. But I liked the product. It's crazy that our politicians can trade like they do.
aoanevdus
Isn’t trading off of delayed disclosures basically being dumb money? You’re in a similar position to a pump and dump victim.
henry2023
Depends on pumping speed. Given the average tenure for Pelosi insider trading, sorry, great investment intuition. The pumping speed is measured in weeks / months instead of hours (like Trump coin).
So being late a few days is not the end of the world.
y-curious
Do you use it? Tell me more, why this one?
ttyprintk
No, it has a feature where it connects to your brokerage in order to execute the trades. That’s rather involved for me.
Turns out I was wrong and it has been submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682786
yieldcrv
I like seeing unknown stock tickers show up
Those have been good to copytrade
jredwards
https://www.quiverquant.com/ is another one I've followed. They do other stuff as well, but they cover congressional trades.
An example: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...
belter
"He Said He Would Ban Congressional Stock Trading. Now in Office, He Trades Freely." - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/congress-stoc...
carabiner
This kind of site seems to hit the frontpage every 8 months or so.
taylorhughes
Looks like the post title got the wrong “capital”, the name is Capitol (ie, the Capitol Building, where congresspeople work)
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hash872
Congressional (or executive branch.....) stock trading is completely unacceptable and should be totally banned. Full stop.
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
kasey_junk
Most congresspeople are just in index funds. And almost to a person the ones that aren’t are extremely wealthy people with portfolio goals different than indexing the market.
Aurornis
This looks like any other blog spam website pushing newsletters and clickbait. Why is it being upvoted here? Are people upvoting out of anger at politicians trading stocks without looking at the website first?
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Peteragain
Yep. Looks like it. The links in comments to ones that do it better are useful. An opportunity for someone to collate and compare as a bit of investigative journalism.
kacesensitive
Public officials should not own stocks full stop.
hamstergene
Publicly announcing trades many months ahead should be enough, without having to get too radical about it.
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.
Terr_
> Publicly announcing trades many months ahead should be enough, without having to get too radical about it.
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.
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darth_avocado
Holding public officials to the same standards as insiders should also suffice. Trading windows, pre set trading schedules, immediate disclosures etc. are all easily enforceable solutions. That would allow them to trade as much as they like, but with reasonable restrictions.
Jtsummers
It might be reasonable to say they shouldn't own individual stocks (of their own selection), but not owning stocks is unreasonable. They get paid well, but not that well.
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.
tombert
I agree; I don't think it's realistic to tell them not to invest at all. The only real way to preserve your money is to invest it somewhere.
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.
AbstractH24
> The only real way to preserve your money is to invest it somewhere
Don’t tell that to folks planning to retire soon.
ivanmontillam
But isn't that a significant conflict of interest if they are public service employees?
If they are truly people-oriented as they oath when they join public service, why allow them to own stock at all?
Jtsummers
> 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.
kasey_junk
Should all government employees be banned from owning stock?
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autobodie
Then we can pay them more, or not and they can take another job instead. Either way, I can't take you seriously.
Jtsummers
> Either way, I can't take you seriously.
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.
infecto
I respect the sentiment but I think it should not be as drastic as that. However they should have to follow the same rules and regulations that many insiders follow at public and private firms. Specifically those firms that do investments or trading. The fear of god is put into you about the importance of compliance with MNPI due to enforcement actions from the government yet the government itself pays no mind to it.
Ekaros
Real arms length fully open pension fund would be reasonable. All investments would have to be made in that fund or sub-fund. These would also be fully open to public. And also ban any communication between those making investment decisions and those in office.
theptip
Index funds seem fine, having some skin in the game is a good idea.
trgn
Can cut both ways. If you're on the Fed board, you sell all your stocks before taking office and then crash the market by hiking rates.
What about owning any asset class? real estate? is that allowed? Metals?
sksxihve
Owning stocks isn't the problem, it's trading stocks on non-public information that is the issue
outer_web
Well the holdings also create a conflict of interest in how they choose to vote.
tombert
If they had broad ETFs that had a whole bunch of companies (like VTI), then conceivably that wouldn't bias their vote as much. They'd have a personal reason to make sure that the entire stock market is doing well.
sksxihve
Fair, but you can own stocks in a blind trust
HPsquared
Pretty much everyone owns stocks.
VincentEvans
IMO broad categories of government employees should be restricted to owning broad index funds. But at least as far as upper echelons of political power - house, senate, supreme court, president and his cabinet - there should scarcely be any debate at all.
Personally I would prefer restricting them to SNP500. US does well - they’ll do well.
outer_web
The page lists trades from two days ago but doesn't explain how they get their information. Do some congressmen report immediately?
BrunoJo
Another great source for trades made by US politicians is https://stockcircle.com/congress-stock-trades. You can see their whole portfolio and also follow other investors like Warren Buffett to see what they are investing in.
InfinityByTen
I'm a bit uneducated in the ways of shorting options. Is this topical because Mr. President induced a massive stock market meltdown in the US and his friends could have made a fortune for knowing the details and shorted the most likely biggest loss-makers?
Or is that not how the markets work?
ZeroTalent
yes. They are called put options. (simplifying)
explained here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/putoption.asp
instagib
Richard Burr may have been convinced to not seek reelection to avoid prosecution.
“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...
khaki54
Personally I think Congress should be obligated to invest in US small cap funds only. Perhaps they could also design state versions and you can invest in some mix between US small cap and state based funds.
j16sdiz
Given how much power they alte already have , they can just setup their own "small cap fund". Create shell companies that fits the criteria, etc.
If we can't trust the lawmakers, something has fucked up already.
I think we need more transparency, not more restrictions. Trust and Verify.
epoxyhockey
I'll save everyone hours of headache. The only politician's disclosures that are worth anything are Pelosi's. And by Pelosi, it is actually her husband that trades but that she has to disclose those trades as a politician. You can also copy Pelosi's trades exactly if you are into speculation and you can experience first hand how many of his trades end up -30% or more, but over the course of the year they have a chance of gaining. They gain not so much because there is any meaningful insider information, but because he holds the position for 1 year and we are still in a bull market (even as of tonight).
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.
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fragmede
Looking at their performance numbers as a whole, they're nothing special, but the underlying story where they make policy changes that affect the markets, and they're also allowed to bet on that market, just feels so unfair that it's no longer about the numbers but it's about the emotion.
echelon
> we are still in a bull market (even as of tonight).
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.
outer_web
Why are the only trades worth following the Pelosi ones?
epoxyhockey
He is a professional trader and the others are politicians.
outer_web
How do his rates of return compare to these politicians?
jatora
Hmm this seems like a strange take.
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.
astrange
> 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.
mmooss
> 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.
outer_web
Taking "time in the market beats timing the market" a bit to the extreme, I think.
pton_xd
> 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.
There's no conspiracy in acknowledging that politicians sometimes use their influence for personal gain, when it's convenient. That's just human nature.
sksxihve
How is acknowledging that politicians have insider information a conspiracy?
jatora
I dont think everything is a conspiracy, but it is obvious corruption is rampant in US politics, and who in their right mind would think that that stops at leveraging special committee insider knowledge for personal gains?
randomcarbloke
there was a tool like this for tracking c-suiters and the trades of theirs that relate to their own companies, anyone got a link?
The data is not new as a number of other systems cover this but I am happy for it to get more press.
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.