101–110 of 150 posts
Radical proposal: Rather than trying to police leakage of insider information, level the playing field for both politicians and fed employees by creating a dozen or so national mutual funds of at least 1,000 equity positions each that intend to model the US economy as a whole. Anyone can invest in them, but all US Federal employees and immediate family members are required to liquidate all other positions and hold on…
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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.
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.
This is my tweet, thanks for sharing! If anyone is interested, I built a dashboard that tracks the performance of individual congressional stock trades here: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/ It also allows you to search for trades by stock, instead of needing to parse through thousands of disclosure forms. I do want to mention one weakness of my data, which is that I don't currently parse hand-filed discl…
So can't see how building a trading bot that trades on information at least a month old even if info at the time was good would give any big advantage. This strategy is going to be fairly useless imo over the long term even if you assume the politicians trading was better than the overall market.
It's hard to find a calculator/data source that takes dividends into account, but it looks like if you bought an S&P500 index fund in May 2022 you'd be up around 18% depending on which day you purchased. So not very dramatic IMO
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Wouldn't that just incentive those people to always favor the items in that fund, therefore providing an advantage to anything that makes in on the fund? Given two competitors in a market, what if the existing but inefficient one is in the fund but the new one that is trying to shake thing up and/or do a better job is not? You might see a lot more protectionism, and not just against companies of other nations, but ag…
i think thats the point? better than favoring just a few stocks you have insider info on...
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The post says “The market has been flat during the same time period.”, which is not true.
The market was roughly flat between when the strategy went live (in may of 2022) and when the post was made. The backtest goes back further though, which is what is shown in the graph. Could be improved by having a line on the graph showing when it went live.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 her…
Radical proposal: Rather than trying to police leakage of insider information, level the playing field for both politicians and fed employees by creating a dozen or so national mutual funds of at least 1,000 equity positions each that intend to model the US economy as a whole. Anyone can invest in them, but all US Federal employees and immediate family members are required to liquidate all other positions and hold on…
What do you mean by "immediate family"? That usually means spouse, parents, children, and siblings. Sometimes also grandparents and grandchildren. If you mean something like that then your proposal seems overly restrictive. I don't see any point in say the USGS not being able to hire a seismologist they want to hire because the seismologist can't convince his brother to sell his Microsoft stock and his adult daughter…
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> That would of course dramatically limit the people who pursue public office to you know, only ... people convinced that the graft in office would offset the loss of opportunity from investment gains.
There are actually people that aren't self interested in public service, they do exist. You can find them at state parks, libraries, museums and schools even. I've met plenty of scientists for instance, that work at universities, places like MBARI and JPL and for the city/county at lower salaries without stock options for the opportunity of public service. They're real, we just need to get more of them in higher offi…
Sure, I'm one of them.
If you think that for the subset of public service that constitutes "electoral politics", that cutting people out of the opportunity to have investment income while in office is going to restrict office holding to those people, than you are, well, hopeliessly naive. Compared to the status quo, you'll eliminate some good people who would have been happy enough putting their investments in a blind trust and not been acting out of conflicts with their own investments, and you'll eliminate some people for whom the ability to serve their own investments was a deciding factor, but there's all kinds of corrupt interests that don't rely on having investments in ones own name that people pursue in politics.