From Unusual Whales:
Congressional Trading in 2021
Congress likes to trade.
That being noted, last week marked the end of President Joe Biden’s first year. The Biden Administration has continued to fund pandemic aid, rolled out vaccines, promoted infrastructure, and insists on Build Back Better.
Our congressional members have been privy to the conversations and negotiations that have formed Biden’s legislative agenda. These have been taking place throughout the year in meetings behind closed doors. All the while, our elected officials have also been actively trading stocks, options and other financial assets.
UnusualWhales.com is the go to place for retail tooling in options, equities, and crypto markets. It helps retail traders, expose market wide corruption, does deep market research and also has cool memes. I have previously highlighted unusual political trading. This report aims to summarize all political trading from the past year. There was a lot.
I looked at all financial disclosures from December 1, 2020 to December 22, 2021 (Note: as the remaining trades from 2021 come in, I’ll update this report). If you are interested in last year's reports, check out for the senate and for the house. It might be a good place to start. Their trading last year was incredible.
Here’s the TL;DR for 2021 just in case, but I encourage you to read through, check out my other posts on the topic (all linked below) and to share your thoughts with me on Twitter or the Discord community.
TL;DR
- Hundreds of millions of dollars have been exchanged on the stock market by our elected officials in 2021 alone
- In just equities, Congress bought and sold nearly $290 million throughout the year.
- In 2021, Congress beat the market!
- This report shows which sectors were preferred by each party and branch, oftentimes huge trade amounts could be attributed to one or two members.
- Big legislative events (such as the Infrastructure Bill getting passed by the Senate) were often preceded by politicians trading in the sectors affected. There were tons of unusual trades where politicians made millions of dollars.
- Congress has 45 days to disclose trades to the public, sometimes they are late and you can see a list of late disclosures here!
- Some politicians held securities in the sectors they vocally expressed support for (such as Senators holding cryptocurrencies while drafting crypto regulations).
- This report highlights many of these and other unusual instances!
Total value ($) of assets traded in 2021
Last year, Congress bought and sold nearly $290 million in stocks (corresponding to 3,500+ transactions by 105 members of Congress), $140 million in options contracts (270+ transactions by 6 members), $124 million in other securities like private equity funds (200+ transactions by 19 members), and $500k in cryptocurrencies (25 transactions by 6 members). 430 members did not take a trade in 2021. Other assets were also bought and sold, you can see total amounts below:....
....MUCH MORE
Why on earth are Congresscritters trading options?
Synthetic shorts?
