“Well, if you could cheat for $84, you could cheat for $800.” – Green Acres
I had a scam caller the other day threatening to put me in jail for tax fraud. Heck, I don’t even pay taxes.
First, I’m not a financial advisor, so please consider this commentary by an Internet humorist entertainment – you shouldn’t trust me since I lost $75 betting that Oprah would eat weight watchers in 2008. Not the food from the company Weight Watchers®, but actual people who were watching their weight.
I’m willing to bet that the people who give tips to sitting Congressmen aren’t, financial advisors, either. They’re insiders. Sure, a law was passed in 2012 that was supposed to ban insider trading. But Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped $1.7 million in travel stocks (in 33 transactions) on February 13, 2020.
I like Mongolian poetry, but it has prose and Khans.
You know, in February. When he was getting classified Corona briefings where the CIA admitted that they’d have to overthrow the United States government instead of the Russians because of the planned travel restrictions.
But Senator Burr got those briefings before travel stocks tanked.
If it was me who sold that stock right then, you can be sure that the Feds would wonder where I got the psychic ability to make trades. After all, the Feds put Martha Stewart in the slam after they investigated her for insider trading. (Yes, I know that Martha went down for lying to the Feds and not insider trading, but that just generally results in an additional term in Congress for most people.)
But not Senator Burr. Nope. The FBI investigated him, and the Department of Justice concluded that what he did was just awesome sauce, and awarded him six more terms in the Senate.
I met a baker that was a natural at stock trading – buy dough, sell pie.
The financial performance of sitting Congressvermin is amazing:
- Representative Collin Peterson, Minnesota, started in 2008 with $123,500. In April of 2020? He was worth $4.2 million.
- Representative Judy Chu, California, was worth less than $100,000 in 2008. By April of 2020? She was worth $7.1 million.
- Senator Roy Blunt, Missouri, went from $602,000 to $7.1 million in the same time span.
How did these people do that?
I’m sure it was careful investing and not at all sweetheart deals that aren’t available only to powerful members of Congress. I mean, it makes sense that Barack Obama entered the White House worth $1.3 million and today is worth somewhere between $70 million and $140 million.
Biden is busy in the White House – he spends most of the day watering his hair.
Where did he make that money? Books. Public speaking fees. Netflix® opening up a truck and shoveling money down his mouth. Certainly, none of this sounds like a payoff, does it?
But every Senator and Representative can’t be shoveled money like that. I’m betting that in many cases, the payoff is just a tip here and a tip there. That’s not protected, but remember that Congressparasites can just decide to not pay their taxes and not suffer any significant consequences.
There is, however, an idea that I’m thinking of doing. I haven’t done it yet, but at some point (maybe next week?) I was going to start checking out trading ideas from here (LINK) or here (LINK).
They had to bribe my brother to be good when he was a kid. Me? I was good for nothing.
Yup. People are now making it easy to track the trades of the people getting paid off in Congress. Are all of the trades going to be winners? Of course not. But the stock purchases by Congressrats outperform the market by between 6% and 10% per year.
Maybe the Congressswine are just picking stocks that are already doing well and jumping on the bandwagon?
No.
The stocks that senators bought had zero abnormal performance before the senators bought them. After a year? Those same stocks had abnormal positive returns of 25%. This is a rock star level of performance – put any of these people at a hedge fund and they’d be billionaires in less than a decade.
This is not chance.
They’re cheating.
Does it matter how they’re cheating?
When Warren stopped running for president, it was the second race she left that year.
Probably not. As long as they consistently do it, though, who cares? There does seem to be a skew to it – Senators in their first term seem to do the very best. Perhaps that’s when they take the ticket and sell out their principles for high returns so they can be blackmailed later?
Nah. That’s silly, right?
Regardless, although you and I can’t get book deals and have people sell us real estate for ludicrously low prices, I’m going to check to see if I can’t cheat like the pros.
Stocks? Don’t forget about commodity futures….
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-03-30-1994089066-story.html
…which can have long term benefits….
https://www.investors.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/wEDITclinton112618.jpg
Perfectly done, sir! Guess that cattle futures have an end . . .
“After all, the Feds put Martha Stewart in the slam after they investigated her for insider trading. (Yes, I know that Martha went down for lying to the Feds and not insider trading, but that just generally results in an additional term in Congress for most people.)”
Funny I was laughing and talking about this story the other day to my wife. The stock went way higher than her sold price. Had she been a congress critter she would not have sold.
Yup! She would have . . . known.
I actually thought of this, trying to follow what the crooks, I mean politicians , are doing. But you can’t go wrong right now with vaccine stocks.
Well, you could give it a shot . . . . (ducks)
The couple of years during very early adulthood that I worked off the books to support myself used to be something I was rather defensive about whenever the subject came up. But today I look back wistfully on those times when I actually got away with something, however small. Its been nothing but relentless wage slavery ever since. And no, zoomers, this late-late boomer will never recoup more than a fraction of the danegeld in old age benefits that the goobermint extracted from me and mine at gunpoint since I was fresh out of my teens.
That same goobermint decided we didn’t deserve any of those rounds of stimulus checks they were handing out recently like Tic Tacs while picking our pockets until there was nothing left but lint.
To say that we live now in a banana republic is not really fair to bananas. I like bananas.
Now that you hold public office, may I suggest that you are simply terrible at taking bribes? I’m sure it’s a skill, like most other things. Gooble “How to take a bribe”. Err, from a neighbors computer.
And everyone should keep in mind we’re in the stage of history where ‘money’ has value. Once America enters it’s ‘Mad Max’ phase trading bullets will be all the rage.
D’oh! Dangit, I guess I do suck at that! Gophers and Woodchucks are my natural prey. For bribes.
It is way beyond insider trading. There is a great book titled Extortion by Peter Schweizer (review at my old blog: http://thesidos.blogspot.com/2013/12/book-review-extortion.html ) where he looks at the various ways politicians line their pockets. The political class are parasites who bleed off the productive citizens of the country but they are starting to run out of us and are going to be left with a lot of people with their hands out and nothing to put in them.
Excellent post.
The irony is killing me:
“The former attorney general William Barr and supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett have reportedly signed book deals – with Barrett paid a reported $2m for a volume on how judges should not bring their personal feelings into the way they rule.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/supreme-court-justice-amy-coney-barrett-reportedly-signs-2m-book-deal/ar-BB1fOD5c
Congress aren’t at the top of the heap when it comes to gaming the system, they are the errand boys.
From my pinned gab:
“In case anyone thinks stock market corruption is a recent thing or only about hedge funds:
“U.S. central bankers not only regularly leak secret information about monetary policy, but the leaks are so predictably timed that a savvy investor without access to the leaked information could make money just by buying stocks in certain weeks.
That is the bottom line from new research by University of California Berkeley professor Annette Vissing-Jorgensen and colleagues, presented on Saturday at a conference attended by central bankers from around the world.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/11/22/the-federal-reserve-leaks-price-sensitive-information-enabling-stock-market-profits/?sh=6ab1abd43c0d
“European Central Bank-published study found suspicious trading ahead of seven regular U.S. economic releases, saying information leaks probably helped traders make more than $160 million in profits in two markets over six years.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/ecb-paper-finds-suspicious-trading-in-u-s-economic-indicators
“Government agencies routinely allow pre-release access to information to accredited news agencies under embargo agreements. Using high-frequency data, we find evidence consistent with informed trading during embargoes of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) scheduled announcements. The E-mini Standard & Poor’s 500 futures’ abnormal order imbalances are in the direction of subsequent policy surprises and contain information that predicts the market reaction to the policy announcements. The estimated informed trades’ profits are arguably large.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X16300812
Strangely, the search terms “economics paper, market reacts before federal reserve announcement” for 1995-2017 pops up most of the above articles on the front page of duckduckgo, but nothing on google…
The above is from about 30m of research, I’m sure there is plenty more out there.”
https://gab.com/Zorost/posts/105647418666728574
Perfect! And 100% true.
And that’s how they take the ticket.
I took a break from drawing caves and furniture (Aaaaaaaagh!) for WWWtime under the now bare oak branches and was not disappointed. Larfs and insight! And we still have a new Bombs and Bants for after dinner.
(Bombs and Bants, people! It is excellent value, now that Phineas and Ferb is off the air)
By the way, Kuru reports that “he” is having no luck at all in stock trading. The neighbors all want chicken or vegetable rather than industrial waste. Picky. Picky
Ha!
Bombs and Bants is insanely fun to make. I feel so happy when we do it. Then?
The Mrs. spends 20 hours actually making it.
The best government that money can buy will build Babel back better because the taxpayers have deep pockets.
We’ll all get a free pretty pink unicorn to ride over to the rainbow stew bubble up fountain or at least tell ourselves that as we live in a favela comrade’s hovel containing nothing as part of muh unity.
Obedience to a cabal of tar pit fossil midwit grifters who can never have enough?
Hell no.
If you ain’t cheating then you ain’t trying as a famous baseball manager once said.
Yup. And our politicians certainly *are* trying.