[despideme]

The point is not if the politicians did better than they would have with another investing approach. It's a standard conflict of interest: the appearance of insider trading is corrosive because others see it and figure it's "how the game is played." So they need to do the same to keep up.

[OJFord]

If the 'other investing approach' is a broad market index like the S&P 500, where is the 'appearance if insider trading'?

GP's point is that they could be almost entirely in the S&P500, with some minor innocuous deviation (tracking error, frankly!) and it would look the same. So this isn't really suspicious at all.

Sure it's a US-focussed index, but isn't that you want from your politicians? (Outsider perspective here fwiw.) It'd be worse if they were some foreign country's politicians where the markets at home had done poorly and they'd basically tracked much better performing US index.

[despideme]

Anecdata to follow. Does this not look suspicious? https://www.threads.net/@quiverquantitative/post/CzcB_jyA_pD The politician in question is a 69 year old former football coach who bought stock in a cloud-based e-commerce software vendor before the company was acquired, then when the stock spiked 50%, he sold it right away.

[stouset]

Yes, it is likely individual politicians are making insider trades.

It is also likely that some of those politicians are making bad trades based on overvalued or misvalued insider information. I have personally seen this in other contexts where people know something presumed private about a company, assume it’s a bigger deal than it is, and trade on that information.

It’s also likely that there are a lot of politicians who are generally just as bad as the average person at stockpicking.

All this combined, and it’s reasonable that the overall trend will be mostly in-line with the market, but likely overperforming sonewhat in the long run based on the volume and quality of insider trades. One year and change isn’t the long run.

[defrost]

Well, if you factor in that he bought his position of > $600K US in multiple buys less than a month before the spike then yes, you might say it was a little suspicious.

What a lucky man.

[kasey_junk]

Turns out US insider trading laws have nothing to do with fairness (even if you aren’t a congressperson).

They have to do with theft. Me trading against you from an information advantage is encouraged! This isn’t an insider trading issue, it’s an ethics issue.

[blitzar]

Kids on wallstbets were buying 100-1 leveraged short dated options paid for with their credit cards on the same stonk for the acquisition.

[SoftTalker]

If you’re holding elected office or have other regulatory/lawmaking powers you should only be permitted to hold index funds, or preferably you should have to move all your investments into a blind trust. Then there’s little chance you’re benefiting personally from inside info

[davidgay]

Down this path is the requirement that politicians be independently wealthy, so that we can require them to earn no money and take no money-related actions, as those all risk corruption.

Is that really what you want?

[seanhunter]

No that's not down that path at all.

For lots of jobs your ability to trade in stocks is restricted. For example when I worked in the securities division of Goldman there was a restricted list of stocks that I was not allowed to own (because we were publicly doing something for them) and then I had to send all my trades through the employee trading desk because they had another list which was the restricted list where the deals weren't public yet so say we were going to be advising XYZ corp on a potential takeover of MNO corp. Only the people on that deal team would know anything about it, so XYZ and MNO stock wouldn't be on the restricted list but if I tried to buy or sell either of those stocks in my personal account I wouldn't be allowed. And there were other restrictions as well.

When I worked for a software company I wasn't allowed to trade in any stock of any of our clients or prospective clients and I had to sign a thing saying I wasn't going to trade based on any client information that was disclosed to me in the course of doing business with the client. etc

These kinds of restrictions are absolutely normal in business. Additionally, in other countries, politicians don't have this sort of carve-out on insider trading laws. This wouldn't be some kind of slippery slope. For example in the UK, members of parliament have to publish their financial interests to avoid these kinds of conflicts https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/contents22...

[thayne]

I kind of think that lawmakers should have to live off of the median income of the area people governed, so that in order to improve their own finances, they have to improve the situation for everyone.

[chii]

Empathy cannot be forced.

[fennecfoxy]

Politicians should be all tax paid. There should be some entry requirements based on skills and abilities rather than connections/tenure/etc same as everything else.

Campaigns should be paid for with tax money with a strict limit for every candidate and harsh penalties for any under the table bullshit.

Corporations that would nominally donate can just not. And we can fucking tax them appropriately and stop them and their C levels tax dodging at every available opportunity.

The way things are at the moment, democracy is really just a corporation/business, isn't it? Pretty sure all of this is driven by apathy though, the average voter doesn't really care enough about these issues + humans are too easy to manipulate into race/class/etc wars to divide voters and distract them from thinking about the real issues - but the only reason they're so easy to distract is because we're all so self serving; people don't care so long as they can vote for the "team" that says they hate the people they hate.

[lobocinza]

> Campaigns should be paid for with tax money with a strict limit for every candidate and harsh penalties for any under the table bullshit.

> Corporations that would nominally donate can just not.

In Brazil campaigns are funded with taxpayer money, there are very strict rules for donations to election campaigns and donations from corporations aren't allowed. This is the theory but for real nobody gives a damn about the rules, corporations donate outrageous amounts behind the scenes and politicians do whatever they want. It is a clown show.

[specialist]

Alternately, strengthen democracy: roll back the clock on money-as-speech, restore fairness doctrine, make publicly financed campaigns the norm, implement RCV (executives) & PR (assemblies), etc, etc.

[tacitusarc]

I actually don’t see how this follows

[kevinpet]

You could say it doesn't matter and they need to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and I would agree. However, it seems clear that the entire point of this particular trading bot and the project is in fact whether politicians did better than another investing approach.

[mewpmewp2]

Are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to buy stock at all?

Because you could cherry-pick any period of time to highlight that they have outperformed the market.

[CydeWeys]

That would be a very reasonable restriction. Anyone who works on Wall Street can only own broad index mutual funds.

[seanhunter]

It may have changed recently but that's not quite how the restrictions worked on Wall St in my experience (8yrs in the front office at Goldman). There are lots of restrictions to the point where owning broad funds often becomes simpler, but you can do single-stock trades etc if you want to.

See another comment where I explain more but how it used to work for me was you have to trade through the employee trading desk (and aren't allowed to have unmonitored brokerage accounts) then any trade gets vetted against various lists (some but not all of which are available to you ahead of time to protect deal confidentiality) and then there are static criteria about how long you have to hold particular positions etc.

[BobaFloutist]

Yeah probably not individually.

They could put investment money in like an independent index fund maybe...? Although honestly there should probably be a "Congressional Investment Fund" that they have to put any stock investment money into that invests equally across all publicly traded companies or something.

[bmitc]

> Are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to buy stock at all?

There are several jobs that are less powerful and have less conflicts of interest where that is indeed the policy.

[mardifoufs]

Sure, why not? If they aren't willing to sacrifice that for their constituents, as to reduce any risk of conflicts of interest... I'm not sure they should be in any position of power to begin with. Why not just have their savings/pension in a known, public index fund?

[kelseyfrog]

You could, but I'm positive that statisticians much smarter than me have devised a test tunable to any sensitivity one desires. The real question is, "What's our threshold of sensitivity, and what are the FPR and FNRs are we willing to endure?"