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.
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.
Wouldn’t the significance of that depend on the time window? If you had an end of first term senator right now, the S&P is up 37.8% over 5 years, while BRK.B is only up 22.3%. Even over a longer period, some proportion will do better than Buffett just randomly.
Not A relevant comparison. The returns and available opportunities for someone investing hundreds of billions are very different from someone investing thousands or single digit millions.
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.
The "no commercial purpose" restriction is going to create a lot of regulatory push-back on any ETF marketed that way. Part of me thinks a sufficiently motivated group could mount a legal attack on that rule, but that would be expensive unless you got some public interest group on your side.
Since the STOCK Act was passed, the alpha in these trades has basically evaporated [1]. I think if you looked carefully, you could find some alpha in the industry tilts, as trades in sector ETFs attract far less scrutiny and laws have a tendency to affect industries as a whole. I haven't checked myself.
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?
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
We know from recent viral claims about senate stock trades that people creating and spreading online conspiracy theories don't care about details like whether the senators actually had any involvement in the trades, nor do most mainstream media outlets, and I suspect they're likely to be the main user base of a tool like this unfortunately.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779
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.