(JustPatriots.com)- It has become standard practice for members of Congress to exploit their positions for financial profit. Despite laws barring Congress from using their inside information to purchase or sell stocks, they’ve found ways around it. That’s one benefit of being the body that makes the laws – you can always leave loopholes in place to exploit.
Recently, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul made news when it was learned he purchased up to $11 million worth of mega-cap tech stocks that quickly earned him over $5 million in profit. Days after Paul Pelosi bet big on Big Tech, the House moved to advance five antitrust bills to rein in Silicon Valley.
Speaker Pelosi, of course, denies anything untoward, arguing that she had no prior knowledge of these transactions and that she does not own any stock.
Really? That’s her argument? Her husband, not she, owns stock? Has Nancy never heard of “community property?”
Well, profiting from stock purchases while working in Congress just might have gotten a bit harder to hide thanks to a German financial company called 2iQ.
2iQ has launched in in-depth service called Capitol Trades which permits users to track how members of Congress and their families are playing the markets.
With the passage of the 2012 STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act), members of Congress now have to report what securities they buy and sell.
Capitol Trades service, launched on August 2, compiles all of those filings in one enormous, free database that lets users see what politicians are trading, and filter by asset class.
2iQ built Capitol Trades because it believes investors should be able to benefit from seeing just what US politicians are buying and selling. Additionally, 2iQ wants there to be increased transparency around politicians’ trading – something many have demanded for years.
While creating the data for Capitol Trades, 2iQ lead researcher Muhammad Huzaifa Waseem said he would often stumble on trades where a politician bought during a dip at just the perfect time before the price began rising. Conversely, a politician would sell stock just before it started going down.
2iQ isn’t the first company to come up with a service like this. Smart Insider and Senate Stock Watcher do something similar. However 2iQ says that with Capitol Trades, it has created a detailed and searchable service that incudes additional analytics as well.
