Do House members' stock trades beat the market? A test of 8,900 trades

If you want stock trading by congressional representatives (or government officials more broadly) to be banned, I don't think it matters whether they actually beat the market.

The best argument against stock trading is that even the appearance or potential for impropriety of this kind violates the public trust and undermines faith in our governing institutions.

Being an elected official should come with borderline draconian limits on how you are allowed to spend your money.

Median performance? That's not a correct calculation.

To calculate proper stock returns you need weighted mean. Often in stocks you have a few outliers that give the vast majority of your profit.

I don't know if this is ignorance, but from a methodological standpoint this seems like an attempt to deceive or hide data.

If you only measure median performance as this is doing, do any group of individuals' stock trades beat the market? I'd expect most of the alpha to come not from the median transaction but from a few well timed buys or sales.

Not sure the average representative is the right benchmark, that's not the real insiders. The real insiders would be in the upper ranks of congress, with prominent seats in commissions, part of security briefings, and with front row in draft legislations (the average representative first discovers the proposed new law when a 7000 pages final version is dropped on their desk 20 minutes before the vote).

Yeah, I've looked at the net worth of various congressmen recently, and most of the wealthy members were wealthy from before politics. Americans complain about their politicians only getting into the career to get rich, but that doesn't seem to be true. In fact, it's kind of shocking how little they get paid, considering they run one of the most powerful countries in the world. This is even more true at the state level.

I remember reading they don't disclose the exact date and hour of the purchase and sale, so intra-day trading or tight timeline trades are impossible to measure, is that correct?

If anyone wants to analyze the raw data using R or AI or whatever, you can find it here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PD84w61HrL1a6lyAMGCO...

I'm having tons of fund.

So it seems of the intra-day trades, 10% of the trades occurred on companies that gained 5% in value that same day? Not sure about this, uploading the data to a Google spreadsheet for everyone who wants to analyze this.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PD84w61HrL1a6lyAMGCO...

Another nice example of Claude vibe coding put to good use. It's going to be weird to wrap my head around purpose built websites that organize and sort deep dive info being as accessible and interchangeable as spreadsheets.

Why not make all trades public information?

Web site is bit to get through.

So do they beat the market or not?

They can place false bs deliberate losses, they should be banned outright, jesus, there's a think in banking called PEP but in the usa, its somehow okay having trump do what he's doing and Pelosi what she was doing.

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