TL;DR: Senators beat the market. Did you know you can analyze your Senators' trades and investments? Wonder no more: "Conclusion: This analysis proves that Senators indeed get a better return than the overall market. Whether it is due to insider trading or due to their superior stock-picking capability is something that can’t be proven from the data and is left to the reader’s judgment. I intentionally left out the party affiliation of the Senators as I felt that it would bias the reader and was not the objective of this analysis." "If you had invested in the stocks Senators bought, even after adjusting for the lag of disclosure, you would beat SP500 over the long run." "Brian Mast seems to be the frontrunner with making almost 100% gain in one month, investing in lesser-known companies. Michael Garcia also seems to have made it rain with his Tesla plays." "These are the worst trades made by Senators with Greg losing more than 80% of investment value within the disclosure period." "John Curtis made a whopping 95% average return on his investments. All the top 10 Senators comfortably beat the market return of 26.4% during the same investment period. " "The top 3 senators as shown above invested more than $15MM over the last 2 years and were also able to beat the market at the same time."
"While there is scope for a lot of discussion regarding the legality/ethical aspects of this,..." NO, there is no scope for discussion. THIS IS BLATANT INSIDER TRADING. Financial traders at banks are virtually not allowed to trade any equities (very strict regulations and reporting guidelines if), neither are any of those with potential insider knowledge. All lawmakers should be strictly prohibited from investing in any specific stocks. There are a million ETFs out there. Even then the potential for abuse is MASSIVE. Any lawmaker who traded within days after obtaining privileged information about covid and before that information was made public should be criminally charged. Fucking unbelievable. The powerful abuse the system more and more and the stupid lemmings debate the merits of different crypto currencies. Humans on average are fucking retarded.
While the stock market returns from those representatives (none are/were senators) are impressive, the best returns are in futures. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr940527.htm That's a compound annual growth rate of more than 46,000 percent!
Sure. It is all legal. Or they could hire an intern who copies their trades, even with 1 month lag the picks still beat the market.