When Nancy Pelosi’s husband makes a stock trade, more than 100,000 Americans automatically do the same.
That is because they have invested in the “Pelosi tracker” via an app that clocks every trade made by Paul Pelosi, husband of the long-time congresswoman from California and former speaker of the House.
Last year it delivered a 54 per cent gain, outpacing the 23 per cent rise of the S&P 500, which tracks the performance of 500 leading companies.
About 110,000 investors with a combined $400 million are using the Pelosi tracker, according to its 29-year-old inventor, Chris Josephs. He first launched the tracker on Twitter in 2022 after years of suspicion about how Paul Pelosi and other well-connected political figures were repeatedly able to outperform the S&P 500.
Chris Josephs, 29, says there is something “fishy” about political trading
“What better way to highlight the hypocrisy of their stock trading than to literally go in and copy them?” Josephs told The Times.
A ‘hysterical’ 50% return
Since 2012 all members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children are required to disclose any stock market trade over $1,000 they have made in the previous 45 days.
Soon after Josephs created the Pelosi tracker he launched Autopilot, an app that connects the tracker to users’ brokerage accounts, allowing them to automatically mimic all of Paul Pelosi’s trades. Users have made a combined total of $2 million from the tracker via his Autopilot app, he said.
The Pelosis, left, in New York last month with Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea
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Though his company is not “explicitly saying that [politicians] are insider trading, there definitely are some fishy things, and it is honestly ridiculous that they allow themselves to continue to do this, because it just creates massive distrust,” Josephs said. A spokesperson for Nancy Pelosi said she did not own any stocks, and had no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any of her husband’s transactions.
Fred, a 46-year-old finance professional from Manhattan, is one of the Pelosi tracker’s satisfied customers. In 2023 he used it to invest $10,000; a year later, when he exited the fund, his investment was valued at about $15,000.
“What I found hysterical was that it was outperforming all of my traditional investments,” he said on the condition his last name not be used.
Boom times for whoever controls the Senate
Autopilot also allows users to mimic the investments of other politicians and businesspeople, including the Republicans Dan Crenshaw, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tommy Tuberville, as well as a group of Trump donors.
Crenshaw has described accusations of insider trading as “bullshit headlines”. He told The Free Press last year: “This is one of those stupid things that I’ve been dragged through the mud on. Do you know how much f***ing money I’ve ever had in the stock market? About $20,000, yet I’ve been dragged through the mud on this as if there’s some insider trading.”
Dan Crenshaw and, below, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tommy Tuberville have trackers dedicated to their stock market trades
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ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES
NATHAN POSNER/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
House Republicans’ stock purchases have outperformed the market by an average of about 12 per cent whenever their party controls the presidency, House and Senate over a two-year period, according to research published last week by Wolfe Research.
“Intuitively, when Republicans hold the presidency and Congress, Republican lawmakers may have better visibility into business-friendly policy moves — tax cuts, deregulation efforts, government contracts, etc,” write the authors of the study, who analysed congressional stock trades over the past decade. They “thus might act on information or expectations that give them an edge”.
Democrats’ stock purchases yielded especially good results when their party held the Senate, even if they did not hold power in the House, the report said, adding that in scenarios where Democrats had partial control, a Democrat’s buy outpaced the market by about 8 per cent over a two-year period.
“One could speculate that House Democrats in those moments might have insight into legislation likely to pass the Senate or regulatory actions under a Democratic administration, thus trading accordingly,” the report said.
Most Americans back ban — but is it so simple?
A small number of other funds track politicians’ trades. In 2023, Subversive Capital and Unusual Whales launched the Nanc fund, named after Nancy Pelosi, which tracks trades by all Democratic Congress members in the House and Senate as well as their family members.
The fund delivered a total return of 58 per cent since it launched in February 2023, according to Dan Weiskopf, a portfolio manager for the funds. Subversive also copies trades of congressional Republicans with the tracker “GOP”, which has delivered a total return of about 30 per cent over the same time period.
“I think most people who are rational would agree that it’s wrong our politicians, who frankly we’ve hired because of their expertise … can invest, along the lines of what they think is the right thing for their portfolio, despite conflicts of interest,” Weiskopf said.
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Some 86 per cent of Americans support banning members of Congress and their close relatives from trading stocks in individual companies, according to a poll of 2,600 voters by the University of Maryland School of Public Policy in 2023. This included more than 80 per cent of both Democrats and Republicans, as well as independent voters.
Democratic politicians’ trades tend to tilt towards growth and technology stocks, Weiskopf said, while Republicans invest more in value stocks as well as crypto. The biggest holding in his “GOP” tracker is the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that Trump has said he wants to make the US the “crypto capital of the world” by creating a friendly regulatory framework.
The Republican senator Josh Hawley has raised questions about potentially “unethical stock trades” by members of Congress and their spouses, citing Paul Pelosi’s exercise of options to purchase shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, in 2021, a week before the House judiciary committee advanced antitrust bills taking aim at Google. The trade netted him an immediate $4.8 million gain.
In April of this year Hawley reintroduced the PELOSI Act (Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments), which seeks to completely ban members of Congress and their family members from trading or holding individual stocks.
Josephs said a full ban, however, would be “more complex than it sounds” because preventing family members from investing in certain funds could affect their professions. Instead, he said members of Congress should be banned from trading stocks in industries they oversee. He also believes they should disclose trades immediately, instead of allowing a 45-day delay. Doing so, he said, would create “a lot more trust”.
Weiskopf agrees that more transparency is necessary. Of American politicians, he said: “We believe they have integrity. And they do, I hope.” But he added, “I think younger people are even more enraged about this issue — enraged that their members of Congress are using information to their benefit.”
