I didn't use this tool, I instead used Senate Stock Watcher [0]. But a cursory review [1] of the trades made by senators showed the amounts to be very small (66% of trades were < 15k) and the typical Senator is a millionaire. In the 4 month period I analyzed, only 3 trades were between 250-500k.
I looked at performance as well, but its tough to benchmark these things. There were net outflows in the market during that period and if you sold you did relatively well in a falling market, so the typical trade did well. But the relatively small size of the trades makes me skeptical that insider information was used. Matt Levine said it best:
> Of course they could be lying, but in context the defense seems pretty plausible. (Kelly Loeffler, for instance, controversially dumped about 0.6% of her portfolio at around the same time, which sure seems like the sort of thing an investment adviser would do without any input from her? You could call your adviser and say “a disaster is coming, sell everything!,” but calling them to say “a disaster is coming, sell a tiny bit!” seems pointless.)
But this doesn't include William Barr as he is not a Senator.
That's neat idea, but I think the reporting lag is too long to action it. Would still be good for retroactive benchmarketing.
Also consider that extremely wealthy senators (many are) might only have a small part of their assets in stocks and could be part of a bigger financial strategy, as a hedge against other asset classes rather than an indicator of where they or their agent thinks the market will move.
I looked at performance as well, but its tough to benchmark these things. There were net outflows in the market during that period and if you sold you did relatively well in a falling market, so the typical trade did well. But the relatively small size of the trades makes me skeptical that insider information was used. Matt Levine said it best:
> Of course they could be lying, but in context the defense seems pretty plausible. (Kelly Loeffler, for instance, controversially dumped about 0.6% of her portfolio at around the same time, which sure seems like the sort of thing an investment adviser would do without any input from her? You could call your adviser and say “a disaster is coming, sell everything!,” but calling them to say “a disaster is coming, sell a tiny bit!” seems pointless.)
But this doesn't include William Barr as he is not a Senator.
[0] https://senatestockwatcher.com/
[1] https://medium.com/ml-everything/analyzing-us-senators-stock...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-14/senato...