Primary Topic
This episode delves into how members of Congress engage in stock trading, leveraging publicly available disclosure forms to track their investment strategies.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Members of Congress trade stocks, which can be tracked through public disclosures.
- New ETFs allow public investment mimicking congressional trading strategies.
- Ethical concerns arise regarding potential insider trading by politicians.
- Political affiliation influences investment preferences, with Democrats favoring tech and Republicans oil and gas.
- The discussion about banning stock trading by Congress members continues, highlighting the need for transparency and trust.
Episode Chapters
1. Introduction
Hosts introduce the episode's focus on congressional stock trading.
Tamara Keith: "Today we want to highlight some reporting from our friends over at the indicator from Planet money about how lawmakers are making money from the stock market."
2. The ETFs: Nance and Cruz
Discussion about two ETFs that mimic the trading patterns of Democratic and Republican members of Congress.
Deirdre Walsh: "He has created two separate ETFs, exchange traded funds, right, that are modeled on the trades by members of Congress."
3. Investment Strategies by Party
Analysis of the types of companies each ETF invests in, revealing partisan differences in investment choices.
Waylon Wong: "The biggest category of holdings is actually oil and gas...almost 11% of the cruise ETF is in oil, gas and consumable fuels."
4. Ethical and Legal Concerns
Debate over the appropriateness of Congress members trading stocks, with insights from anti-corruption advocates.
Josh Graham Lin: "Members of Congress who are serving the American people simply shouldn't be in a position to trade individual stocks."
5. Closing Remarks
Recap of investment outcomes and a look forward to future episodes.
Tamara Keith: "Suffice it to say, the value of those funds has changed since that effort aired."
Actionable Advice
- Consider investing in ETFs to diversify your portfolio.
- Stay informed about your representatives' financial activities.
- Advocate for transparency in political financial disclosures.
- Explore the ethical implications of your investment choices.
- Engage in discussions about the intersection of politics and finance.
About This Episode
Our friends at the Indicator from Planet Money caught up with congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh to talk about her reporting on how members of Congress and their families trade stock. Then, in classic style, the Indicator team tried their hands at doing so themselves.
People
Tamara Keith, Waylon Wong, Darian Woods, Deirdre Walsh, Josh Graham Lin, Bruce Sacerdot
Companies
None
Books
None
Guest Name(s):
Josh Graham Lin, Bruce Sacerdot
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
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Tamara Keith
Hey there. It's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And today we want to highlight some reporting from our friends over at the indicator from Planet money about how lawmakers are making money from the stock market. Our own Deirdre Walsh has been following this story for months and joined up with the indicator team to talk about it in June.
Waylon Wong
This is the indicator from Planet money. I'm Waylon Wong.
Darian Woods
And I Darian woods. And we have NPR's congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh with us today. She's dialing in from the House of Representatives. Hi, Deirdre.
Deirdre Walsh
Hey there, Deirdre.
Waylon Wong
The stock market is on a tear right now, and you reported this story that caught our attention about a company that partnered with the financial firm to allow everyday people to invest like members of Congress.
Deirdre Walsh
Right? So this was initially created by a trader who calls himself unusual whales.
Darian Woods
Love the name.
Deirdre Walsh
He has created two separate ETF's, exchange traded funds, right, that are modeled on the trades by members of Congress. So he's using publicly available forms, disclosure forms by these lawmakers or their spouses and dependent children's trades to model one ETF called Nance, which is modeled on democratic lawmakers trades named after former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Waylon Wong
So casual Nance.
Deirdre Walsh
And another ETF called Cruz after Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
Darian Woods
Very good.
Deirdre Walsh
To show how the two different parties investment strategies are working in the market.
Waylon Wong
Darien, today on the show, you and I are going to invest in these two exchange traded funds, as in these funds that track range of different companies. One of us will go with Nance, comprising companies held by democratic members of Congress, and the other will go the cruise direction companies held by Republicans.
Darian Woods
And as we do this, we'll also consider whether politicians should even be allowed to play the market.
Waylon Wong
So, Deerja, how do you think we're gonna do?
Deirdre Walsh
I think you're gonna do really well based on the past experience of these funds.
Darian Woods
Well, past performance is no indication of future performance.
Waylon Wong
No. No. I think we're gonna get rich, Darian.
Darian Woods
If you can't beat them, join em.
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Darian Woods
All right, so, Waylon, I now have here the Planet Money investment fund.
It's a very sophisticated jar.
Waylon Wong
Oh, there's actually stuff in it. Cause, you know, the planet money stock trading experiments have not gone that well in the past. Let's just say.
Darian Woods
Yeah, the origin was in 2010 when the planet money team bought a toxic asset. Needless to say, that didn't go so well.
Waylon Wong
Okay, should we count out how much we have to fritter away on this new experiment we're doing?
Darian Woods
Invest. Invest, not fritter. We have 50. 6073-747-5767 say quarter and a dime.
Waylon Wong
Nice.
Darian Woods
$77.35.
Waylon Wong
That's a great amount of capital to start with.
Darian Woods
Now, this should be enough to buy these exchange traded funds that are based on Congress members trading as we're taping now, one share of Nantz or Nanc is going for a little over $35 a share.
Waylon Wong
And then Cruz with a k. K r u z. It is almost $30. Okay, now, Darian, there's one quarter in the jar, right? I can do a coin flip for you to figure out which one of us will invest in which ETF. Heads for Nance, tails for Cruz. Okay.
Darian Woods
All right.
Waylon Wong
It's heads.
Darian Woods
Okay, I have the Nance approach.
Waylon Wong
And cruise for you and cruise for me. So we'll each buy one share, and we'll check back in a week to see how we did.
Darian Woods
Wait, whalen, what did we actually invest in?
Waylon Wong
Yeah, so I'm just taking a scroll through this portfolio. I'm looking at what's in the cruise ETF, and the biggest category of holdings is actually oil and gas. So almost 11% of the cruise ETF is in oil, gas and consumable fuels.
Darian Woods
I'm going to look at the democratic one on the Nancy Nance ETF. I'm seeing oil, gas, and consumable fuels is actually 0.65%. So basically less than a percent. Oh, gosh, very little. What about software?
Waylon Wong
Yeah, mine is 6.2%.
Darian Woods
Mine is 17.5%. So democratic congresspeople love software, but republicans less so.
Waylon Wong
Oh, that's really interesting.
Darian Woods
Yeah. And on the dems list, I also see pharmaceuticals, retail, insurance.
Waylon Wong
Yep, same here. Investments all over the economy.
Darian Woods
Well, I'm feeling good about my investment because the trading based on democratic lawmakers and their families is up 20% in the year to mid June. And that's about five percentage points more than the S and P 500, which is a reasonable proxy for the overall us stock market.
Waylon Wong
Cruz hasn't done as well. Those republican lawmakers trades are, on average, up only 9%. Not as good as the stock market as a whole. But regardless, this raises the question of whether politicians are using inside information to profit from the stock market.
Darian Woods
Yeah. Josh Graham Lin is the CEO and co founder of represent us, which is an anti corruption advocacy group, and he does not like the status quo.
Josh Graham Lin
Members of Congress who are serving the american people simply shouldn't be in a position to trade individual stocks.
Waylon Wong
Josh supports a bill to ban this trading. And, you know, because all bills just have to have an apronym.
Darian Woods
An apronymouse?
Waylon Wong
Yes. This is an acronym that actually spells out a real word. This one is called the Ending Trading and holdings in congressional Stocks act or the Ethics act.
Darian Woods
Very clever.
Waylon Wong
Now, Josh is okay with members of Congress investing in funds where they're tracking an overall rise in the market, just not trading individual companies.
Josh Graham Lin
I don't think anybody wants to limit members of Congress from making investments and having a positive retirement ahead of them. It's when there's a perception of conflict of interest or perception of insider trading, that's what's really damaging to both Congress's credibility and the american people's trust in our political system.
Darian Woods
Just 16% of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research center say they trust the government to do what's right just about always or most of the time.
Waylon Wong
Oh, geez, that's really low. 16%.
Darian Woods
Not so good. And with the stock trading they're doing, it would be good to know the reality. Like, are politicians systemically making outsized gains on their stock trading?
Bruce Sacerdot
Short answer is no. Absolutely not.
Darian Woods
Bruce Sacerdot is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and he and his co authors tallied all the congressional trades from 2012 to late 2020.
Bruce Sacerdot
On average. They do average, you know, stuff that they sell sometimes goes up. Stuff that they buy goes up, down. And in our paper, they, as a group, underperform.
Waylon Wong
Bruce is not saying corruption in regards to trading never occurs. It just doesn't appear to be systemic. He finds even the top 1% of traders don't look any different from stocks randomly picked, like the proverbial monkeys throwing darts at a dartboard.
Darian Woods
Now, Bruce didn't test monkeys with darts, but he did test reindeer.
Waylon Wong
Actual reindeer?
Darian Woods
Yes. Bruce and his college student co authors did some further research where they literally went, went to a Christmas style theme park called Santa's Village, and they got reindeer to pick stocks by walking on pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Bruce Sacerdot
So they used the point of the hoof to decide which stock they were buying.
Darian Woods
Well, so you actually did this? I was reading the paper, and I wasn't sure if this was just a Christmas parody. But you actually got the reindeers to pick stocks.
Bruce Sacerdot
Absolutely. And, you know, some of my favorite parts of the paper, where we point out that they exhibit hurting behavior and that they're good at sniffing out of new trends.
Waylon Wong
I feel like Bruce temporarily turned into a zoologist. Are we talking about investors or animals?
Darian Woods
Look, he always wanted to study biology, but his parents made him study economics.
But, you know, Bruce does say there is a serious point here.
Bruce Sacerdot
The reindeer outperform the congresspeople and the senators on average, especially in a finite time horizon, and a couple of good picks dominate everything.
And that point might carry over to the recent conversations about congressional leaders doing so well because you have this idea that, well, maybe Nancy Pelosi is really killing it in Nvidia and other tech stocks, but you have to ask yourself, okay, is that really inside information, or is it that she represents a district that has a lot of tech companies, and when tech companies are doing well, she and her husband Paul are doing well.
Waylon Wong
So we asked Josh, the advocate for bans on congressional stock trading, whether this kind of evidence made him rethink his position.
Josh Graham Lin
I don't think so. I mean, think of it this way. If you had an NBA player who was bad at rigging the rules in favor of their team, would you still let them rig the rules in favor of their team? Of course not.
Waylon Wong
Maybe this ethics bill would protect congresspeople from their own bad stock picks.
Darian Woods
That would be a funny outcome.
Tamara Keith
That was Darian woods and Weylin Wong from the indicator from planet money. Suffice it to say, the value of those funds has changed since that effort aired around midday Wednesday. The cruise fund was trading at about $30 and the Nance fund was up at about 37. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with the weekly roundup. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. Happy 4 July, and thanks for listening to the NPR Politics podcast.
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