Here's Where to Track (and Predict!) Your Congresscritter's Insider Trades
By Stephen GreenWant to find out how much money your congress-critter makes from insider trading? Ever been curious to see the correlation between bills, votes, big-money donations, and shockingly handsome investment returns? Would you be interested in an A.I. geared to predict lucrative congressional trades before they happen?
There's a website for that.
It's called GovGreed, and it's an AI-powered search engine that "fuses [machine learning], deep learning, and 7 intelligence layers to predict which politicians will trade — and in which sectors — before the 45-day disclosure window even opens."
Over on X, Ricardo dug into the "crazy" numbers and found that "56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on."
Worse — or better, if you're a member of America's insider-trading nomenklatura — Ricardo also revealed that "343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information."
But wait, there's more.
GovGreed's AI identified 752 "triple signals" in the sitting Congress. A triple signal is when a congress-critter sits on the committee writing a bill, "they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry."
Triple signals trade at 5.4 times the normal rate of congressional trades, he found.
In other words, Congress isn't just trading on insider information. Congress generates the information, influenced by donations from the very companies whose futures are written by Congress. The result? While the S&P 500 so far is on track to generate a 10.8% return in 2026, Congressional traders earned 10.2% in the last 30 days, according to the site.
You've probably long suspected all this, but GovGreed put it all in one AI-enhanced searchable database. There's a subscription required to get to all the good stuff, and I'm debating right now whether to whip out my credit card.
Democrats like California's dynamic trading duo, Nancy Pelosi and Ro Khanna, made some of the biggest returns, but plenty of Republicans are in on the game, too.
The STOCK Act requires congress-critters to report their trades, but Ricardo found that Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, "made 1,443 trades in three years, more than 98% of all politicians tracked," and also "violated the STOCK Act twice in a single year, disclosing up to $900,000 in trades months after the legal deadline."
The penalty for violating the STOCK Act is a $200 fine, because Congress writes the rules that Congress has to live by.
"The number of Congress members ever prosecuted under the STOCK Act since it passed in 2012? Zero," notes Ricardo.
Probably the only real solution is to start electing a better class of people to Congress, which is more than a little like saying, "I bet instead of messing with those big dangerous rockets, we could just all wish a permanent moon base into existence."
When Mark Twain wrote in 1894 that "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress," he was likely being uncharacteristically generous in his estimation for an elected office he also called "the trivialist distinction for a full-grown man."
So if we ever do get that Article V Convention of States — which both fills me with hope and wakes me with night sweats — I have a modest proposal for the convention to consider.
It's a rule of thumb that individual investors hope, over the long term, to earn a 7% return on their investments. I propose that instead of passing ethics laws that the most unethical people in the country will circumvent, we amend the Constitution to tax any congress-critter investment returns above 7% at 100%. And all revenues would go to deficit reduction. Nancy Pelosi alone could put a nice little dent in our national debt.
Anyway, that's my modest proposal. What's yours?
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