[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.