Copying U.S. Congress Members' Stock Buys — 4,095 Disclosures Tested

"U.S. lawmakers buy stocks on inside information, so you should just follow their disclosures" — a belief widespread enough that Autopilot's Pelosi tracker has drawn more than $1 billion in assets under management. We tested it against the disclosure data.

Method

• Data: mirror data of U.S. House stock trade disclosures (STOCK Act), 4,095 purchase disclosures since 2022 (the Senate mirror was excluded because its updates stopped in 2020)
• Entry: closing price on the trading day after the disclosure date — based on the day we can know about it, not the day the member actually bought
  • Correction (2026-09-04): the actual code entered at the close on the disclosure date itself (a lookahead error in a shared function, see Article 17 §3). Since lookahead biases results in a favorable direction, this article's rejection conclusion — that it underperformed the market even under that condition — still holds.
• Judgment: excess return versus SPY, with 0.2% round-trip costs applied

Results

Following Congress as a whole underperformed the market with statistical significance, and more so the longer the holding period. The large-buy and Pelosi-only cohorts point positive, but with samples of 125 and 13 respectively, they are not judgeable.

Then what explains the Pelosi tracker's returns?

Representative Pelosi has only 13 purchase disclosures over four years, and those stocks showed no excess return. The tracker's high returns are better read as a product of call-option (LEAPS) leverage plus concentrated directional exposure to big tech. Even for the same stock, buying shares and buying a two-year call option are entirely different bets.

What these numbers say

The disclosure delay of up to 45 days is not the whole problem. That there is no excess return even when entering at the disclosure timestamp means the disclosed purchase names themselves carried no market-beating information (as of the point when it was observable).

Limitations

• Possible omissions in the House mirror data. Individual members' option positions were excluded from the test
• The 2022–2026 sample period is a bull phase for large-cap growth stocks

Data sources

• Public mirrors of U.S. House stock trade disclosures (house-stock-watcher lineage); prices from our own U.S. equity price database