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Show HN: Stock Performance of US Senators
- volkk 6y agowhere do you get this information? is it publicly available?
- bingdig 6y agoAll the info is from the senate's personal finance disclosure documents: https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/
- hckr_news 6y agoCool. How doable is it in creating a trading bot that trades based on politician’s portfolio and stock trades
- bingdig 6y agoWe're not planning on doing anything right now related to that. But long term when we have some more time it'd definitely be more doable using a service like Alpaca
- soared 6y agoIt would be interesting to hand pick one or two senators who seem to outperform anyone else and mirror their trades too.
- volkk 6y agoaren't their trades a lagging indicator anyhow? it just shows what they've already done so it doesn't seem like it would be helpful
- soared 6y agoMy idea was that somebody might make trades ahead of time with insider knowledge, so mirroring those still might get you in on it. I don’t know how delayed the data is, but knowing how slowly politics move it could work.
- volkk 6y agoright but that falls in line with the fact that you would have to know what theyre buying at the exact time theyre buying it. and this data is realized money when all trades had already been made and profited from. politics moving slowly has nothing to do with buying up shares via e-trade or fidelity and it happening instantly
- Stanleyc23 6y agowould need to consider the lag in time between them making the trade for themselves and the them disclosing it. I expect that would probably wipe out most of the alpha.
- alex_g 6y agoThis is awesome, but is this accurate? The largest holding listed is Susan Collins with a $37mm investment in 3M... Everything I can find from a google search suggests she is not really that wealthy.
- bingdig 6y agoHey Alex, it's as accurate as the data the senator's report, but we've noticed a lot of inaccuracies that are later corrected - maybe some haven't yet been corrected? Two points on that specific trade: 1) stocks include an entire family's holdings, and the 3M position is held by her husband, 2) We have to estimate the value of ranges that are reported, and we've chosen to use the midpoint but the lower end may be more true (e.g. $5,000,001-$25,000,000 is estimated to be $15,000,000) Here's the link to the original filing (have to accept terms first): https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/view/ptr/0c76c4e6-afb1-45c2-a1a3-90a1cf2f58c7/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/view/ptr/0c76c4e6-afb1-4...
- soared 6y agoIt looks like the site is struggling under the load, so below is a screenshot of the homepage showing an overview. Certainly some outliers but they'd require significant research to understand. https://i.imgur.com/W4WgxX0.png https://i.imgur.com/W4WgxX0.png
- sxp 6y agoIt's good that you have the S&P as a benchmark. It shows that the median performance of a senator (4%-6%) is lower than expected (10%). Can you add the S&P to the histogram so it's always there? That would make the difference more obvious.
- harikb 6y agoIf the senators use this data and that argument to prove they didn’t make too much money or didn’t do anything wrong, then please remove all insider-trading laws. Right now, it only hurts the law abiding minority that accidentally makes a mistake
- solveit 6y agoIt's hard to accidentally insider trade and very hard to get prosecuted for accidental insider trading in the United States. Europe, maybe. But not the US.
- bingdig 6y agoTrue although it's not quite that simple. Most senators have less risky portfolios than the S&P 500 with lots of bond ETFs and the like, so that's not a perfect comparison. We're working on creating a risk-adjusted return measure to provide a more accurate comparison.
- hendzen 6y agoprobably makes sense to use a few different metrics of information ratio vs $SPY, t-bills and a 60/40 portfolio.
- mehrdadn 6y agoInstead of just plotting S&P, they should divide by it to reject the common-mode signal.
- all2 6y agoWhere does this signal come from in a time-sequence series? I looked up "common mode signal" and in EE it looks like line to line interference, or line to ground interference. Does the existence of this signal presume a Senate's portfolio performance is somehow coupled to some index fund performance (S&P in this case)?
- cdubzzz 6y agoMaria Cantwell has a very weird portfolio...
- bingdig 6y agoAlmost all her stock holdings are of RealNetworks, a company she worked for in the 90s and that has been on the decline since the Dotcom bust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cantwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cantwell
- brenden2 6y agoTIL RealNetworks still exists.
- mardifoufs 6y agoWoah, it lost 99.99% of its value since 1999. She really ate enormous losses . Also what is RealNetworks even selling at this point? They seem to have generated 175m$ last year!
- ilikehurdles 6y agoFacial recognition, apparently: https://safr.com/ https://safr.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cdubzzz 6y agoIt would be nice if the details table below the graph updated automatically to filter for a Senator selected in the graph.
- acruns 6y agoDo you plan to add the members of the House?
- bingdig 6y agoYes, that's in the works along with Executive branch data!
- ztratar 6y agoThis is frigin' awesome.
- easterncalculus 6y agoWould you be willing to share some of the technologies/frameworks you use to host the site? Great idea!
- bingdig 6y agoSure, we have a very limited tech knowledge - mostly from statistics and economics - so I'm sure it's not that optimized but was easy for us to get up fairly quickly. Site is hosted on Squarespace and all the data visualizations are created with Plotly (written in R) and hosted on AWS
- easterncalculus 6y agoVery cool! It looks great.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 6y agoCould you add the registered party of the Senator to the table.
- bingdig 6y agoSure, we've gotten a couple requests for this and think it'd be really helpful. State and party affiliation will be up in 1-2 days
- s_y_n_t_a_x 6y agoThank you for the quick reply. Awesome site!
- elipsey 6y agowarning: page is memory hungry AF! gave my laptop a wedgie... it's awesome and important, but close some tabs first :p
- seqizz 6y agoI was thinking why my mobile Firefox crashed...
- jackewiehose 6y agoIt crashes for me too. So does twitter from time to time. It is sad that todays websites offload so much work to the client. I wish they would just deliver some text and pictures (which would probably worked out perfectly fine in this example!) so that in case of bugs their server crashes instead of my web-browser.
- bobsoap 6y agoYeah, unfortunately it crashes Firefox on Android every time.
- simlan 6y agoYeah same here. I don't have the beefiest Android so I thought might be my issue.
- divbzero 6y agoI’m guessing it loads and graphs all the data with SVG? Lots of data points and DOM elements.
- jackpirate 6y ago1 tab used 6gb of memory for me on firefox, yikes!
- wutangisforever 6y agoFeature request would add to this if you open source it If Senator is head of a committee, say agriculture, show all underlying assets in that sector
- bingdig 6y agoThat's a great idea and something we have in the works!
- asdfadsfgfdda 6y agoDoes this include dividends in returns? Most senators are older (closer to retirement), I am assuming they invest more in dividend stocks and bonds than growth stocks.
- randtrain34 6y agodoesn't include dividends
- jdikatz 6y agoWe use adjusted close data pulled from Yahoo Finance to calculate daily returns. Adjusted close prices include adjustments for all applicable splits and dividend distributions.
- hendzen 6y agoadjusted close prices aren't what you want, when a dividend occurs the adjusted close price is reduced by the dividend amount. you want total returns.
- ApolloRising 6y agoYou should show all a senators holdings in one view when filtered by their name.
- joelbluminator 6y agoThis is great. If I had the patience I would write some script that alerts you when there are major sell offs. The last crash was preceded by heavy sales by a few senators that were exposed to data and knew how serious the COVID19 thing was before the public.
- albntomat0 6y agoThere is a significant reporting lag, between the actual stock sales and the notification on the tracker. For example, the sales of Sen Loeffler that were widely reported in the news, were not released until 12 March, for transactions in early February. The stock market as a whole had already significantly declined, but was still a ways from its low, on that date. Link (you have to accept the initial terms of use thing, and then reload that link): https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/view/ptr/370492b8-ed0a-4792-b45b-972d5da8a1e5/ https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/view/ptr/370492b8-ed0a-4...
- phreeza 6y agoThey also probably don't have a sufficient fraction of their net worth in public stocks to make insider trading worth the risk of the repercussions of being caught doing so.
- joelbluminator 6y agoI don't think it counts as inside trading. If a senator hears expert discussions about a pandemic in China and sells all his stocks - does that count as insider trading?
- albntomat0 6y agoThe particular words for insider trading are "material non-public information." If the expert discussion is on Youtube, fine. If it's only available to senators, using resources of the US government, then it meets the definition of insider trading.
- 6y ago
- TurkishPoptart 6y agoHow can I learn to build something like this? Does it use a scraper system?
- sixothree 6y agoI am definitely not OP. But I would guess there is some background agent or cron job running that populates his database from the dataset api. From that there is the web site that reads from the db to render the two visualizations - graph and table. His methodology page describes where this data comes from: https://www.govtrades.com/methodology https://www.govtrades.com/methodology Incidentally someone sent me this link today; a list of charting libraries: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/06/12/20-best-javascript-chart-libraries/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/06/12/20-best-javascript-char... edit: on closer inspection it appears the charts are provided by squarespace. So maybe squarespace also provides the connector for back end data as well?? please correct me if I'm wrong or terse
- bingdig 6y agoThat's pretty much it, but charts are made with Plotly (R) and then hosted on AWS S3. We embed them in Squarespace code through Amazon Cloudfront to speed things up a bit. There area probably better ways to do this, but we don't know a ton about this so just used the tools we did know about.
- maerF0x0 6y agoFeature request: Summing by individual and top N / bottom N individuals . Also would be interesting if there are any sources for estimated private holdings?
- jdikatz 6y agoThe 2012 STOCK Act requires disclosure of all assets exceeding $1,000 in value -- so the disclosure information we collect includes private holdings. We only calculate financial returns for listed assets. This is an active topic in our research pipeline -- specifically, whether holdings in private companies are going up among officials. Returns in private companies are certainly less transparent, so this might be the way to go if an official wanted to obfuscate.
- covidien 6y agothere is additional data relating to the activity of house representatives [0]. [0] http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx http://clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-search.aspx
- ghthor 6y agoThis is great!
- greatwave1 6y agoHere is a similar site which I built for members of the House of Representatives: https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/housetrading https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/housetrading
- spilk 6y agodoes this include former senators? Al Franken shows up in the search at the top.
- jdikatz 6y agoWe include all senators who were in office sometime between Jan 1, 2014-present. Senators are removed as they leave office (and no longer included when calculating the "all senate" index).
- ReedJessen 6y agoIf you open source this, I would like to provide coding support. Please reach out.
- alexandra_cgg 6y agocan you regress the senator returns against the market returns to strip out the market
- jdikatz 6y agoHi Alexandra, this is a great suggestion! We're still figuring out what the right set of benchmarks for "market" returns are -- right now we use the S&P 500, but are also considering alternatives like passive age-appropriate target date funds and portfolios constructed using Fama-French factor weights. But we will ultimately add a panel that shows abnormal returns for each official as you suggest.
- boromi 6y agoAny detail on the back-end and charting?
- jliptzin 6y agoThis is cool but I think it gives people a false sense of security that their lawmakers aren't taking financial advantage of the positions they're in. Surely if a Senator came across a lucrative but illegal opportunity to profit off of some kind of information they become privy too, they'd do it in a way that will bypass the Senate Financial Disclosure Database, such as having friends/family trade by proxy for them, selling that valuable info to the highest bidder and getting paid in bitcoin, etc.
- jdikatz 6y agoThis is a reasonable concern. And indeed we only (currently) track holdings of publicly-traded securities, where for some senators a decent fraction of assets are in privately-held companies or things like property investments. We take some solace in the fact that officials are required to disclose trades by spouses + dependents (which we include in our calculations), but you're right that we could be missing more illicit activity. We hope that this work highlights potential dangers of allowing officials to trade in individual stocks, and encourage more robust legislation that would limit the sort of activity you're describing. Obviously very idealistic, but that's the goal.
- jliptzin 6y agoGood luck!
- chrisco255 6y agoYeah or put your unqualified son on the board of a foreign gas company for millions like Joe Biden did.
- jliptzin 6y agoWhy do you care about a Ukranian gas company's hiring practices? If they want to waste money overpaying for an unqualified board member simply for name association that's on them. Nobody in this country is affected. The better question is what is the current President's unqualified son-in-law doing handling middle east peace talks AND heading the coronavirus task force. Those things definitely do impact Americans.
- mysterEFrank 6y agopoor maria cantwell
- dietr1ch 6y agoPeople working for the government should only be allowed to either have some certificates or nothing at all. Countries ask their youth to die for them and they can't just ask people with knowledge that makes trading unfair to just restrict to "bad" options while they hold secrets. Not that it matters anyways as they probably still take advantage of things through other people. I'd be pretty good to have a way to really prevent that as this is a problem probably in every country.
- mkhpalm 6y agoI notice at least one of the most invested senators is not in the list. Is that intentional? This might be interesting to see what other people are doing with the Senate Financial Disclosure Database: https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances
- RawChicken 6y agoI noticed the lowest performance corresponds to a woman senator. I plotted what I think are only all woman senators and they all are under the S&P500 performance. Maybe someone with better statistical knowledge than me can study if there is a significant difference between man and woman senator stock performance.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mjohn 6y agoCould be differences in risk tolerance. A portfolio of government bonds, for example, would be expected to have a lower return than the S&P.
- blunte 6y agoI don't know what this website is doing, but it locks my phone up and eventually crashes the ui (Samsung Note 8). Never before have I experienced any behavior like this, not even lag spikes.
- nojito 6y agoMost if not all Senators are in Index funds or use products built by wealth management firms. I struggle to see the value here other than imply that if a senator beats benchmark....that means that they are trading on private information.