Does It Pay to Copy Congress' Stock Trades?
Investing Insights
Morningstar, Ivanna Hampton, Sarah Hansen
4.2 • 539 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode. |
| 0:10.8 | Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, Margaret Giles. If you've read the news over the years, |
| 0:16.4 | you know that members of Congress and their families seem to make more money than the rest of us trading stocks. However, whether they'll continue to outperform the market, or trade stocks at all, |
| 0:26.2 | remains to be seen. If you still want what they're having, there are two exchange-traded funds |
| 0:31.0 | that follow Democratic or Republican stock trades. Zach Evans, a passive strategies analyst for |
| 0:36.8 | Morningstar Research Services, is here to talk about |
| 0:39.6 | what you should consider before trying to duplicate congressional investments. We'll discuss the |
| 0:44.1 | strategy, data, performance, and investment merit of these two congressional ETFs. |
| 0:49.4 | Well, Zach, thanks for being here. No problem. Happy to be here. All right. So the unusual whale subversive Democratic ETF, NANC, Ticker, or Nancy, and Republican ETF, KRUZ, or Cruz, |
| 1:02.5 | aimed to replicate stock trades made by members of Congress and their spouses. |
| 1:07.2 | So why do the ETF's creators think that this would appeal to investors? |
| 1:12.2 | Yeah, so I think there are a couple potential selling points. The first is politically |
| 1:16.2 | aligned portfolios, especially over in recent years, we've seen more of an interest in |
| 1:21.0 | politically aligned portfolios. These definitely fit that bill. And then the next is the perceived |
| 1:26.7 | stock picking prowess of members of Congress. So |
| 1:30.2 | you may have seen stories. There's definitely anecdotal evidence that congressional, that Congress |
| 1:37.2 | people tend to outperform the market or do especially well in their stock trades around market |
| 1:43.0 | events. So I think the ETF sponsor might see |
| 1:46.5 | these as a way for investors to capture some of that outperformance. Cool. So the million dollar |
| 1:52.3 | question, are members of Congress actually good stock pickers? I'd like to know myself. The evidence is mixed. There have been a lot of studies going back decades |
| 2:04.5 | that look at the stock trades of Congress people, various data sets, and the evidence is |
| 2:11.9 | inconclusive. Some studies say yes. Some studies say no, while news outlets may pick up on some of the anecdotal |
... |
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