![Lawmakers backing a congressional stock trading ban gained an estimated +161.8% on stocks [OC]](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/lri9dvcjo8ng1-1024x768.png "Lawmakers backing a congressional stock trading ban gained an estimated +161.8% on stocks [OC]")
Source: insidercat.com/trading-ban-supporters
- Benchmarks: All politicians: +137% / S&P 500: +74.2%
- Positions inferred from bill (co)sponsorship and discharge petition signatory data.
- To estimate returns, we used House/Senate financial disclosures since May 2022.
Do you think Congress will ban lawmakers from trading stocks until 2027?
Posted by Due_Patient_2650
10 Comments
How we infer positions: We pulled related bills & discharge petitions from the 119th Congress and extracted sponsors, cosponsors and signatories.
How we estimate returns: First we estimate positions using the FIFO (first-in-first-out) method, then we calculate returns using [TWR (time-weighted return)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-weighted_return) formula, which is the industry standard to track the performance of money managers independent of cash flows.
Why use time-weighted returns: TWR focuses on the stock-picking ability rather than the cash flows. People like to copy institutions or people in positions of power, so we opted to use TWR to provide a measure that is more telling of a person’s stock-picking ability.
Tools: Python, Next.js
Data sources: House/Senate financial disclosures since 2022-May, Congress website
No, because congress is filled with corruption on both sides of the aisle. A stock trading ban will only happen at gunpoint
They’ll support the bill because it doesn’t actually cost them anything. They know it will never pass, so they can sign on and say they want to solve the problem while continuing to print returns.
Makes sense. They clearly know why the ban is needed, but they are also demonstrating why regulation is necessary.
pull the ladder up behind them
It took crazy inside trader knowledge to invest in these obscure companies like Nvidia and Broadcom and Google
It’s performative because they know that’s what the entire US population wants done. They also know it will never happen because the fox is guarding the hen house.
Reminder that this is an advertisement for a site selling Congressional trading data. Such sites make endless posts like this suggesting that Congressional trading is incredibly lucrative so that you’ll want to buy data from them. (See their low, low pricing information below!) Beware that (1) Their trading data is out-of-date, because trades may be reported up to 30 days after the fact (2) You can get the same data from Congressional websites for free (3) There’s simply not enough information in their sources to compute accurate investment returns. So their “estimated” numbers are largely fiction.
When spot-checking, I’ve found such sites to be pretty sloppy even with the incomplete data available. For example, in this post, notice that the title says that the subset of lawmakers “backing a congressional stock trading ban” gained 161.8%. But right below that they suggest the exactly same 161.8% return for “all politicians”.
https://preview.redd.it/o9h3dyw4a9ng1.png?width=1376&format=png&auto=webp&s=8acf33a5402ab0a54ec0780964f5f06a079a6092
Honestly the amount of people that post awful data visualizations based on statistically faulty methodology on this sub is pretty cringe
This is a beautifully clean chart, and adding the S&P 500 benchmark really drives the point home.
I’m currently building a 3D global data visualization side project, and I always appreciate seeing well-executed data stories like this. Since you used House and Senate financial disclosures, did you have to build a custom scraper to parse all those notoriously messy PDFs, or is there a clean API you were able to tap into?