This is cool but I think it gives people a false sense of security that their lawmakers aren't taking financial advantage of the positions they're in. Surely if a Senator came across a lucrative but illegal opportunity to profit off of some kind of information they become privy too, they'd do it in a way that will bypass the Senate Financial Disclosure Database, such as having friends/family trade by proxy for them, selling that valuable info to the highest bidder and getting paid in bitcoin, etc.
It's good that you have the S&P as a benchmark. It shows that the median performance of a senator (4%-6%) is lower than expected (10%). Can you add the S&P to the histogram so it's always there? That would make the difference more obvious.
People working for the government should only be allowed to either have some certificates or nothing at all.
Countries ask their youth to die for them and they can't just ask people with knowledge that makes trading unfair to just restrict to "bad" options while they hold secrets.<p>Not that it matters anyways as they probably still take advantage of things through other people. I'd be pretty good to have a way to really prevent that as this is a problem probably in every country.
This is awesome, but is this accurate? The largest holding listed is Susan Collins with a $37mm investment in 3M... Everything I can find from a google search suggests she is not really that wealthy.
This is great. If I had the patience I would write some script that alerts you when there are major sell offs. The last crash was preceded by heavy sales by a few senators that were exposed to data and knew how serious the COVID19 thing was before the public.
Does this include dividends in returns? Most senators are older (closer to retirement), I am assuming they invest more in dividend stocks and bonds than growth stocks.
I notice at least one of the most invested senators is not in the list. Is that intentional?<p>This might be interesting to see what other people are doing with the Senate Financial Disclosure Database:
<a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances</a>
It looks like the site is struggling under the load, so below is a screenshot of the homepage showing an overview. Certainly some outliers but they'd require significant research to understand.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/W4WgxX0.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/W4WgxX0.png</a>
Here is a similar site which I built for members of the House of Representatives:
<a href="https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/housetrading" rel="nofollow">https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/housetrading</a>
Feature request would add to this if you open source it<p>If Senator is head of a committee, say agriculture, show all underlying assets in that sector
Most if not all Senators are in Index funds or use products built by wealth management firms.<p>I struggle to see the value here other than imply that if a senator beats benchmark....that means that they are trading on private information.
I don't know what this website is doing, but it locks my phone up and eventually crashes the ui (Samsung Note 8). Never before have I experienced any behavior like this, not even lag spikes.
Feature request:<p>Summing by individual and top N / bottom N individuals .
Also would be interesting if there are any sources for estimated private holdings?
there is additional data relating to the activity of house representatives [0].<p>[0] <a href="http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx</a>
I noticed the lowest performance corresponds to a woman senator. I plotted what I think are only all woman senators and they all are under the S&P500 performance.<p>Maybe someone with better statistical knowledge than me can study if there is a significant difference between man and woman senator stock performance.