The Capitol Hill is full of stock gods.

Author: Wu Wentao

While the domestic financial sector is trending towards a transition from “golden rice bowl” to “iron rice bowl,” American lawmakers have already demonstrated their investment prowess that looks down on Wall Street.

Former U.S. House Speaker Pelosi, hailed as the stock god of Capitol Hill, showcased an investment operation with a 70.9% return rate in 2024. Although she has a 40% excess return relative to the “national fortune index” Nasdaq, she ranks only tenth among a group of congressional members. Republican Congressman David Lauzer took the crown with an annual return rate of 149% thanks to his holdings in Nvidia.

In contrast, the top ten funds selected by Morningstar in the U.S. for 2024 have a maximum return rate of only 56.13%, which wouldn’t even warrant a number tag in the world of Capitol Hill.

If individual cases are not sufficient to portray the overall image of Capitol Hill, then Unusual Whales has also compiled a set of averages. According to their 2024 Congressional Trading Report, in 2024, the overall average return rate for Democratic lawmakers who prefer to hold technology stocks is 31%, while the average return rate for Republican lawmakers who prefer to hold financial and commodity stocks is 26%, which is slightly inferior. However, the average return rates for both parties exceed the S&P 500’s increase of 24.9%.

“Beating the index” is quite a challenging task for Buffett. However, in front of lawmakers whose main profession is legislation, they easily developed their stock trading side business to a level that makes professional institutions feel embarrassed.

Despite the yield behind the lawmakers, they face numerous controversies from public opinion questioning their “insider trading.” However, the situation not only did not turn around, but instead moved towards a more dramatic scene in 2025.

In early April, when the entire US capital market was trembling in the face of the sudden “reciprocal tariffs”, Wall Street found it hard to imagine that President Trump would personally post an annual tweet on Truth Social on April 9 saying - “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” and then, four hours later, officially announce a 90-day suspension of “reciprocal tariffs” for 75 countries. The US stock market, as expected, surged in response.

As the financial center shifts from Wall Street to Washington, anxiety belongs to New Yorkers. After all, the greater the uncertainty in Washington, the larger the information gap among the lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Exciting “coincidence”

Coincidences always happen inadvertently during the investment process of lawmakers on Capitol Hill in the United States.

For example, Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s portfolio recorded a return second only to Rouzer’s. As a senior member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, she has invested in satellite operator Viasat, which has received over $2.7 billion in government contracts since the 2020 fiscal year, with the Department of Defense being its primary client; for instance, Republican Congressman and member of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Dan Newhouse purchased shares in one of the largest government contractors, RTX, in April 2024.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s actions were particularly precise, as she purchased between $11,000 and $165,000 in stocks of companies like Amazon and Lululemon, which had dropped significantly due to news of reciprocal tariffs, on April 8, 2025; the next day, she further bought between $21,000 and $315,000 in tech stocks like Nvidia. And all of this occurred before Trump posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY.”

However, compared to what Senator Richard Burr did in 2020, the congressmen only earned some limited information arbitrage on the outskirts of Capitol Hill.

On February 27, 2020, just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. President Trump claimed that the virus might be seasonal. “It will disappear. Like a miracle, it will disappear someday,” he added, “Of course, it might get worse before it gets better.”

US Senator Richard Burr clearly disagrees. On the 13th of the month, it sold personal shares worth $628,000 to $1.72 million in 33 separate transactions, including a large number of tourism, hotels and other industries that have been greatly affected by the epidemic. On the eve of the market crash, the number of shares he sold in a single day reached a new high in nearly 14 months.

The situation is far from over. On the same day that the president reassured the public, Richard Burr also attended a luncheon called Capitol Hill Club. The guests at this event represented companies and organizations from various industries in North Carolina, all of which shared a commonality: these companies or their political action committees donated more than $100,000 to Burr’s campaign in 2015 and 2016.

According to a secret recording of remarks released by NPR, Richard Burr further explained the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic during a lunch meeting. “Its spread is much more aggressive than anything we have seen in recent history,” Richard Burr said. “It may be more similar to the pandemic of 1918 [2].”

At the same time, Richard Bull made several predictions at the meeting as if he had foreseen them.

1. Traveling in Europe may become very dangerous;

Some community schools in North Carolina may close;

3. Military hospitals may be used to combat the epidemic.

Coincidentally, these predictions eventually came true. Thirteen days later, the State Council began warning against traveling to Europe; sixteen days later, North Carolina closed schools due to the threat of the coronavirus; three weeks later, the public began to be aware of the possibility of military hospitals being requisitioned.

If all the clues are connected, it is hard not to produce the association that Richard Burr, after knowing in advance the severity of the pandemic, not only sold his own assets but also informed the supporters who helped him campaign before the public knew about it.

As the situation escalated, Richard Burr ultimately resigned as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee ( on May 15, 2020, under pressure from public opinion.

For members of Congress, in order to get the $174,000 job, which has not changed for 15 years, they must not only spend a lot of time and energy, but also raise millions of dollars in campaign funds to finally get a chance to serve the American people. But from another point of view, just the amount of shares sold by Richard Burr during the epidemic is at least four years of his salary income.

Although Richard Burr has now left Capitol Hill, the Richard Burr-style congressional investment strategy is still being played out in various corners of Congress. Especially when macro conditions start to dramatically impact expectations and valuations in the U.S. capital markets, wouldn’t tariffs also be a variant of the “pandemic era”?

Although the United States has tried to introduce relevant bills to avoid insider trading by members of Congress, such as the STOCK Act enacted in 2012 specifically targeting Congress members profiting from insider information, the outcome is already predetermined when legislators have to vote on a bill that restricts their ability to make money from side jobs.

A Bill That Exists in Name Only

The stock trading culture among lawmakers is not a secret in the United States. In 2011, a program called “60 Minutes” revealed to the public the insider information regarding “Congress members legally using non-public information obtained during their official duties for trading.”

Stanford University researcher Peter Schweizer revealed in the column: On the third day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Chairman held a closed-door briefing for Congress members about the economic situation, and the Congress members also engaged in a series of stock trades after the meeting.

Especially, one of the House members, Spencer Bachus, bought put options on the market drop the day after the meeting and ultimately made a hefty profit.

In response to Peter Schweitzer’s revelations, Bachus defended himself by saying, “I will not feel guilty for being a good investor; the reason I can make such judgments is that I am one of the best investors around ).”

Spencer Backus insists that he has never traded on non-public information, but this obviously fails to convince the public. According to a poll at the time, only 9% of the public were satisfied with Congress’s performance, marking a historic low on record [3].

At that time, coinciding with the simultaneous elections in the U.S. Congress, in order to gain the support of voters, the congressmen embroiled in insider trading scandals brought up the STOCK Act, which had been drafted as early as 2006 but had never been passed, and it was officially signed by then President Obama on April 4, 2012.

It is worth mentioning that during the voting session, the majority of senators supported the proposal, with only 3 members voting against it. One of them is Richard Burr, who was a big winner during the pandemic.

However, the core of the STOCK Act is not to prohibit trading but to mandate disclosure, explicitly requiring members of Congress and their spouses to disclose transactions over $1,000 within 45 days. On the other hand, the penalties under the STOCK Act are not severe; the first penalty for members who fail to disclose on time is merely a fine of $200.

In the actual execution process, the punishment information of members will not be disclosed to everyone. According to an investigation by Business Insider, between 2020 and 2022, at least 78 members were found to have delayed submitting stock trades, but no one knows if they were fined $200 for violations [4].

The more important point is that, even though members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi and Richard Burr have faced widespread scrutiny for suspected insider trading, since the establishment of the STOCK Act, no member of Congress or senior executive branch official has actually been charged with violating the STOCK Act.

One of the few lawmakers convicted of insider trading, Chris Collins, was found guilty because he, while serving as a director of a pharmaceutical company, learned of the company’s drug development results before the market and allowed his son to sell related stocks early, violating U.S. securities laws.

In July 2024, bipartisan senators jointly proposed a bill named ETHICS, which stands for Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks, aimed at prohibiting members of Congress and their spouses and minor children from trading individual stocks.

The bill thoughtfully made transitional arrangements, requiring current members of Congress to immediately stop purchasing new individual stocks and to divest all personal stock assets by the start of the next Congress in March 2027. Those who violate the ban will have to pay a fine equivalent to 10% of their monthly salary or 10% of the value of the illegal assets (whichever is higher).

However, the relatively mild STOCK Act was proposed in 2006 and passed in 2012, pending for 6 years. Now, the ETHICS proposed last July hasn’t even had a chance to be updated, and the stock market wizards on Capitol Hill have already iterated another version.

From the financial crisis in 2008, when lawmakers profited from trading before bank failures, to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when lawmakers sold off before the outbreak became uncontrollable, and then to the tariff shock in 2025, where the president and lawmakers together manipulated the stock market, nothing summarizes the investment philosophy of Capitol Hill better than “the bigger the storm, the more expensive the fish.”

Epilogue

Warren Buffett once said that his investment principles consist of three rules: “First, never lose money; second, never lose money; third, always remember the first two rules.” For the members of Congress, preserving capital is also their first principle when facing major events.

Take Richard Burr as an example. On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, he told the public not to panic while having his wife withdraw all their savings from the bank, avoiding the potential stampede caused by the financial crisis; similarly, just before the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, he reassured voters while selling off stocks affected by the pandemic, avoiding losses from the subsequent stock market circuit breakers.

“Sticking to one’s capacity” is another principle for many members of the parliament.

For example, Rick Allen, a member of the House Education and Labor Committee who promotes prescription drug pricing legislation, buys and sells stocks related to pharmaceutical companies; Democratic Representative Cindy Axne from the House Financial Services Committee favors bank stocks; and Democratic Representative Alan Lowenthal, who advocates for renewable energy-related legislation, saw his family buy and sell solar company stocks 97 times between 2019 and 2021. [5]

Overall, in terms of investment principles, the lawmakers first avoid losing money, and then adhere to operations within their circle of competence, which can be regarded as a textbook investment guide that rivals Buffett. However, the true stock god earns the respect of global investors through the ability to analyze public financial reports, while lawmakers have been widely questioned for having the loophole of “be first, be smarter or cheat” during closed-door briefings.

Despite Pelosi once confidently defending stock trading in Congress by saying, “This is a free market economy, and lawmakers should have the right to participate,” to ordinary people, Capitol Hill always has an unattainable advantage: they already have the answers before the public has even seen the exam.

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Reference Material:

)Congressional Stock Trades Get Scrutiny, NPROne of Trump’s billionaire supporters has harsh words for the president about his trade war, CNN

[1] The Game of Power and Money - Exposing Insider Trading by American Officials, Xinhua News

[4]Dozens of lawmakers beat stock market in 2024: Report, THE HILL

[7]Marjorie Taylor Greene faces scrutiny over stock trades before town hall, FOX 5