On Tuesday, Trending Politics reported that in 2021 stock trading by Congress beat the S&P 500. Now the Congress people could simply be lucky. If you think it might be because the people in Congress are smarter than the people at S&P, I would like to remind you of an event reported by CBS News on April 1, 2010.
CBS News reported the following:
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) is raising some eyebrows with a comment he made about the U.S. territory of Guam during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last Thursday.
In a discussion regarding a planned military buildup on the Pacific island, Johnson expressed some concerns about the plans to Adm. Robert Willard, head of the U.S. Pacific fleet.
“My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize,” Johnson said. Willard paused and replied, “We don’t anticipate that.”
So much for the idea that people in Congress are smarter than the average American.
The article at Trending Politics quotes a shocking report from Unusual Whales:
According to that report, 105 members of Congress were involved in over 3,500 trades last year, selling somewhere in the range of $290 million in stocks. Further, 6 members of Congress were involved in over 270 options contract transactions totaling about $140 million, and 19 members engaged in $124 million worth of transactions involving “other securities like private equity funds.” Oh, and 6 members were involved in 25 transactions of cryptocurrencies worth a paltry (by comparison) $500k.
Those figures, again according to the report, represent about a $200 million decrease in total trades but a 5x explosion in Congressional trading of option contracts. Democrats and Republicans traded similar amounts, with Democrats just edging out Republicans, though Senators did trade about 3x more than members of the House.
Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It provides a possible clue as to how people in Congress become millionaires on a salary of less than $200,000. This is a bipartisan problem.