Political Memes

Imagine your yearly increase being more than inflation

Imagine having a net worth.

she is certainly the one with the most notoriety. off the top of your head, which party do the rest belong to? which state do they represent?

For a broader view

SPY is S&P500 for those who don't know

2023

2022

Could be all R, could be all D. One thing for certain, they’re all scumbags, S.

The latency is too much. By the time us plebs get the data, it's all accounted for

There are two ETFs that do this already. NANC and KRUZ

There's like a week or so delay in them having to report trades, by then you've missed the profit, drive there's up a little, and when they sell it drops the price because they have a bunch of shares.

A week later you find out they sold, maybe make a slight profit if your fast. Then you hear what they bought a week and go give them even more money.

Because all the extra money following them, them selling a company could domino into real world consequences at the company like layoffs.

The system is broken. We're past the point of "gaming" it for scraps. We need a better system or we're fucked.

People have already tried and failed doing exactly that. Because they aren’t required to report their trades when they’re making them; There’s a significant gap in reporting, so by the time the trade gets reported the stock has already increased/decreased like the congressperson expected.

For instance, let’s say [Generic Congressperson] sees a bill that will help a particular company. They know this bill is going to pass. So they buy stock in the company, vote for the bill, and the stock goes up. They then sell the stock. Three months later, those trades get reported. And now it’s too late, because the company’s stock has already been boosted. So buying now would just be buying after the boost.

This is quiet a bet. All congress members are distributed in a Gaussian distribution around the S&P 500. So copying everyone would just give you the same average. So you would have to pick the members, who outperform consistently. But this changes year over year. For example Pelosi outperformed in 2023, but underperformed in 2022.

And at that point you could just buy individual stocks – or even better: stick to a market neutral ETF.

In exile

Exactly, getting a 20% return on average for years and years is what makes Warren Buffet one of the best Investors. Getting a good year can happen to anyone.

Everyone in America knows that if you're making money in the stock market, it must simply be due to the fact that you are very smart. 🙃

Also, because the folks on this list are entrenched House Reps in permanently safe seats, there's very little to actually be done. I can't vote against Nancy Pelosi from Texas. You can't vote against Dan Meuser from Florida. So what is anyone actually supposed to do? Should I raid Dan Crenshaw's office because Donald Beyer cleaned up? Or should I book a flight to Philly to protest a Congressman I didn't know existed until today?

I also should note that there's a certain fudging of numbers here. Buffett has been in the investment game since the 1950s, but - with the exception of Pelosi - all these guys took office in the last 8 years. The NASDAQ market average over the last 8 years has seen a 20% growth average, with a number of years in which it has grown 40% in a single year. If you just showed up in Congress in 2019 and put all your money in The Magnificent Seven or the FAANG stocks (large, stable, popular blue chip firms) you could also outperform Warren Buffet. If you dumped all your money into an S&P Index Fund, you'd be performing comparably. If you just owned Berkshire Hathaway stock starting in 2019, you'd be outperforming Warren Buffet.

So much of the above isn't Congressmen beating the system, its records starting for a group of Congressmen who happened to take office during the biggest bull run in the market's history.