So... We Aren't Even Trying To Hide it Anymore?

TL;DR

Political insider trading has become brazenly open because weak punishments, crypto betting markets, and government-driven market volatility make it easy and profitable.

Key Points

• 1.A suspicious trade 16 minutes before a Trump Iran announcement may have netted $60 million. Hundreds of millions in notional value were traded within 60 seconds, 15 minutes before a market-moving announcement about de-escalation in the Strait of Hormuz — too brazen to ignore.
• 2.Bad news is consistently buried on Fridays, good news dropped on Monday mornings. EU tariffs, Iran strikes, Mexico tariff suspensions, and Venezuela military operations all followed this pattern, with suspicious corresponding trades tied to every major announcement in the past 12 months.
• 3.Three structural factors have made insider trading easier and more blatant. Crypto-based prediction markets allow hard-to-track bets on any event; government spending now exceeds its WWII share of GDP, creating more market-moving decisions; and punishments remain so light they barely affect re-election chances.
• 4.Congressional outperformance is driven by a small group of heavy traders, not the whole body. Most members made just 3 trades and underperformed the market — but a few dozen active traders pulled Congress as a whole to over 20% above the S&P 500 in 2025, with lawmakers in leadership roles outperforming peers by 47 percentage points on average per NBER research.
• 5.Senior committee members are the primary abusers, with examples like Pelosi trading Nvidia while shaping the CHIPS Act. Tommy Tuberville traded corn futures while on the Agricultural Committee; the party controlling the House consistently outperforms the minority party in stock returns, year after year since Stock Act disclosures began.
• 6.The real cost isn't the ~$1 billion in annual congressional trading volume — it's the policy distortions. Financial incentives discourage fixing economic problems, and America's economic uncertainty index is now at its highest outside the pandemic, more than doubling debt interest repayments over 5 years, costs ultimately passed to citizens via higher taxes or inflation.