Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is the focus of an inquiry into major stock sales in advance of the February-March stock market crash by senators who received closed-door briefings on the spread of Covid-19. As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr received daily confidential reports throughout January and early February on the potential impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. ProPublica reported that on Feb. 13 – less than a week before the market peaked on Feb. 19 – Sen. Burr sold between $628K and $1.72M of his stock in major companies. According to our estimates, this sale amounted to ..read more

Our index indicates that since January 2014, senators have not, on average, outperformed the S&P 500. This is not necessarily surprising. Older senators may have chosen to hold lower volatility mutual funds that under-performed US equities in the bull market. Some senators may have picked individual stocks with little insider knowledge, and prove little better at doing so than most retail investors. These effects are enough to overwhelm excess returns that senators may have enjoyed by trading on privileged information. However, it might be easier to tease out senators’ trading on insider ..read more

Our elected officials are entrusted to set aside their own interests for the good of the nation, but recent scandals suggest that personal profit may come first for some representatives. Despite mandated public disclosures of financial transactions since 2014, tens of thousands of stock trades by congressmen have received little scrutiny for abuse of insider knowledge and conflicts of interest. Our mission is to help put a stop to this by making stock trading data easily accessible to journalists, academic researchers, and the general public. The bills that politicians introduce, the questions ..read more

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is the focus of an inquiry into major stock sales in advance of the February-March stock market crash by senators who received closed-door briefings on the spread of Covid-19. As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr received daily confidential reports throughout January and early February on the potential impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. ProPublica reported that on Feb. 13 – less than a week before the market peaked on Feb. 19 – Sen. Burr sold between $628K and $1.72M of his stock in major companies. According to our estimates, this sale amounted to ..read more

Our index indicates that since January 2014, senators have not, on average, outperformed the S&P 500. This is not necessarily surprising. Older senators may have chosen to hold lower volatility mutual funds that under-performed US equities in the bull market. Some senators may have picked individual stocks with little insider knowledge, and prove little better at doing so than most retail investors. These effects are enough to overwhelm excess returns that senators may have enjoyed by trading on privileged information. However, it might be easier to tease out senators’ trading on insider ..read more

Our elected officials are entrusted to set aside their own interests for the good of the nation, but recent scandals suggest that personal profit may come first for some representatives. Despite mandated public disclosures of financial transactions since 2014, tens of thousands of stock trades by congressmen have received little scrutiny for abuse of insider knowledge and conflicts of interest. Our mission is to help put a stop to this by making stock trading data easily accessible to journalists, academic researchers, and the general public. The bills that politicians introduce, the questions ..read more

A ..read more