
Show HN: Tracking stock trading by US Senators - greatwave1
https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/senatetrading
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dang
There have been two big Show HN threads about this project already:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728049)

The purpose of Show HN is to share and discuss what one has built. It's not in
that spirit to keep returning to the well with new and sensational
instantiations of the same thing.

Also, deleting and reposting, which has been happening here, breaks the site
guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

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hbcondo714
Similar to [https://senatestockwatcher.com](https://senatestockwatcher.com),
posted on HN last month:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834524)

Same data source?

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DevX101
Recommendation: Show the returns for each senator with the S&P 500 and
Berkshire Hathaway performance as reference lines.

I'd be interested to see the senators who have a better track record than
Buffett while in office.

~~~
smabie
Better returns alone aren't indicative of out-performance. What you would want
to look at instead of returns is the Sharpe ratio of Hathaway and the market
vs each senator. The Sharpe ratio is the excess return (return minus the risk
free rate, usually the yield on a 3 month T-note), divided by the volatility
of the excess return.

Another metric to look at would be each senators beta exposure and their R2:
what percent of their returns are generated by their market exposure.

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dt3ft
Please don't mess with the browser default scrollbar (in my case, the
scrollbar is not visible and page content gets cut off). Thank you.

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wolco
This is more list of each stock transaction by a US senator by date.

I would show all of the senators line by line sort by name with a summary of:
how many transactions,total min-to max, last updated, party.

Clicking on the senator would show all transactions by date for that person.

Right now it's more of a data dump.

~~~
texodus
Here, I made a quick dump of this data pivoted by Senator/Date/Side into
Perspective, a wasm pivot-table project I work on:

[https://bl.ocks.org/texodus/8fe1596e298720dff9e1051668e240ce](https://bl.ocks.org/texodus/8fe1596e298720dff9e1051668e240ce)

~~~
doovd
Kelly Loeffler clearly does hft part-time

~~~
KenanSulayman
More like he's doing pretty big orders (i.e. ICE bought at high $20m volume)

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gcmac
Looks like the data may be coming from
[https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/](https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/)

IANAL but I’d tread carefully given the language around not being used for
commercial purposes

~~~
alibaba_x
How exactly can the SEC prove that someone used that site for commercial
purposes?

~~~
gcmac
Again definitely not a lawyer but I’d imagine advertising an ETF or selling a
subscription to an email list based on these trades (both ideas from this
thread) would be pretty clear violations.

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Mizza
"Fun" idea. Would love to see an ETF based around this too.

~~~
chrisma0
A Democrat and a Republican ETF? See which one performs better?

~~~
Mizza
My hypothesis is that you'd see identical performance, but I'm a cynic.

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billfruit
A party marker (Dem/Rep/Ind) would have been useful. Also not having a scroll
bar feels strange. Also does it include purchases made through mutual funds?

~~~
dpcx
Filters by all of the different fields would be useful, too.

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ghufran_syed
I’m pretty sure this also includes stock trades _on behalf of_ senators, so
also includes those carried out by a trust, not under the control of the
senators themselves. I feel the data isn’t useful unless it’s clear which
senators are making their own trading decisions, and which aren’t

~~~
jabedude
Is this completely impossible to track in practice? I would imagine so.

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edge17
Where does this data come from?

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songzme
How /where does one get the data source?

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Seconding this question. Setting a Cron job to email daily and weekly stock
changes would be fascinating.

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unusual_whales
Hey, I built something similar to this for large options/insider movements.

[https://unusualwhales.com](https://unusualwhales.com)

Here's the twitter,
[https://twitter.com/unusual_whales](https://twitter.com/unusual_whales)

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coffeemug
Very cool. Where is the data coming from?

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MobiusHorizons
nit: clicking on the date column sorts alphabetically on the text of the date,
which is not useful. I am aware the default state is sorted in reverse
chronological order by date, but it is not possible to go back to this state
after sorting on any column.

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throwawaysea
How do trades get mapped back to individuals? Is this possible for anyone’s
trades?

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catalogia
I thought senators used blind trusts. I guess some don't?

~~~
throwawaysea
I don’t think they’re required to. It’s a sign of trust if a politician places
their personal business interests into blind trusts but many like Trump
haven’t. Legislators are, however, exempt from some portion of insider trading
laws.

