Though this article makes some good points:
- There's always an excuse: someone else made the trade, or it was just really lucky, or it was smart use of public information.
- There are ways for members of congress to influence the markets that disclosures under the STOCK act won't prevent; e.g. many members of congress trade tech stocks and hold hearings about big tech companies, which can move the markets.
- Trading related to one's congressional duties could be insider trading...or it could be trading on the basis of subject matter expertise. It's not always easy to tell them apart.
- Compliance to the STOCK act isn't great, so the data are incomplete.
- The data are presented in difficult-to-use form. If not for https://senatestockwatcher.com/, we'd be looking at a hard-to-navigate site full of scanned PDFs. Converting those to usable data is probably something the government should be doing!
I'm not sure I agree with everything in this article, but it does make a good point that a lot of the current reporting is decidedly ahistorical. "Record numbers of resignations" don't mean much once you know records were reached in several recent years. What makes this time different? Why the understaffed stores?
Though this article makes some good points: - There's always an excuse: someone else made the trade, or it was just really lucky, or it was smart use of public information. - There are ways for members of congress to influence the markets that disclosures under the STOCK act won't prevent; e.g. many members of congress trade tech stocks and hold hearings about big tech companies, which can move the markets. - Trading related to one's congressional duties could be insider trading...or it could be trading on the basis of subject matter expertise. It's not always easy to tell them apart. - Compliance to the STOCK act isn't great, so the data are incomplete. - The data are presented in difficult-to-use form. If not for https://senatestockwatcher.com/, we'd be looking at a hard-to-navigate site full of scanned PDFs. Converting those to usable data is probably something the government should be doing!