What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing when you think of the greatest investors and business leaders of our time, you might think of people like warren buffett or the billionaire tech founders, like jeff Bezos or elon musk, but wall street and silicon valley aren't the only places where you can make money. Another great place to build a fortune is washington dc. You might be surprised to learn that there are 50 members of congress with net worths in excess of 10 million dollars, of which 10 have net worths in excess of 100 million, while many of them were already rich. When they came to power, they have also seen their net worth steadily rise throughout their 10 years.

Much of these gains have come from trading in the stock markets. There's nothing wrong with investing in the stock market, which is perhaps the greatest engine of wealth creation in human history. But the problem is members of congress regularly have access to market moving information before the general public? The problem of congressional insider trading got so bad that in 2012, obama signed into law the stock act, which requires members of congress to publicly disclose their trading activity house speaker nancy pelosi is one of the most prolific and successful traders on capitol hill. She has been a member of congress since 1987 and since that time has managed to build up an estimated net worth of 120 million dollars.

According to data compiled by housestockwatcher.com, the house speaker has executed 66 million dollars of stock trade since 2020 dwarfing most of her peers, and with these trades she has built quite the track record. The blog market sentiment analyzed over 9 000 trades over the past two years. To see which members of congress had the best returns, nancy pelosi had the ninth highest return, making 37 on a portfolio of 16 million dollars in recent years. Pelosi's investing activities have become somewhat of a meme, with countless tick talkers copying her traits to benefit either from her investing acumen or her potential insider information.

But is there any validity to this strategy in this video we'll take a deep dive into nancy pelosi's trading activity and see whether or not she is benefiting from insider information? This video is brought to you by privacy.com privacy lets. You buy things online using virtual cards. Instead of having to use your real ones, protecting your identity and bank information on the internet, so why wouldn't you want to use your real ones today? There are tons of paid subscriptions with free trials, but you have to input your credit card number to sign up. If you forget to cancel your subscription, they end up charging you automatically with privacy.com.

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Her portfolio has done very well since the beginning of the pandemic, as she has been overweight technology stocks. Most of her trading has been in mega cap tech stocks like apple microsoft, facebook, amazon, nvidia and even tesla. It could just be that she has good investing acumen and knew that technology and software companies would see their revenues accelerate. As people worked from home to see whether there was insider trading, we should look for specifically where a company was impacted by a government policy.

In july of 2020, the ceos of google apple, facebook and amazon were called to testify before congress for an anti-trust investigation. At the time there were big fears that companies like google and facebook could be broken up by regulators. Pelosi bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of facebook stock in january of 2020.. This purchase added to her existing state, which was worth multiple millions of dollars in may of 2020, she sold at least one million dollars worth of facebook stock.

This was two months before the congressional anti-trust hearing and there was already significant speculation around anti-trust scrutiny for the company, as speaker of the house, pelosi is in charge of congressional hearings, there's a very good chance that she was already in the planning stages for the anti-trust Hearings when she sold her facebook shares, despite members of congress from both sides of the aisle criticizing zuckerberg's company, the hearings were not as bad as feared and the stock price continued to rise about a month after the hearings, pelosi proceeded to dump the remainder of her Stage after she sold the stock continued to rise, she would have been better off if she had just held the position. But facebook wasn't the only big tech talk. She was trading around the same time of the anti-trust hearings in may and june of 2020. She sold between 3 million and 12 million dollars worth of apple stock.

The last sale was less than one month before the congressional hearing apple was considered by many analysts to be one of the most at risk. Companies. From the anti-monopoly perspective, developers have long complained about the 30 feet that they charge on the app store. If regulators forced them to reduce this, it would have a material adverse impact on the company's profitability.

After the hearings, pelosi seemed to change her mind and started buying back her multi-million dollar stake in the company. This has worked out quite well for her as the anti-trust concerns never materialized and the stock continued to grind higher throughout 2021. She also bought shares of the cyber security company crowdstrike a few months after she bought it. A company called solarwinds was hacked exposing thousands of government emails.

Crowdstrike was a big beneficiary whenever there's a high-profile cyber attack demand for their cybersecurity. Solutions increases the timing of pelosi's stock purchase was not terribly suspicious, but congress is regularly briefed on cyber threats. It is possible that pelosi knew more about cyber security than the average person. Here's what we know so far.

Nancy pelosi actively traded millions of dollars worth of big tech stocks in close proximity to the july 2020 anti-trust hearings, but there's even more to the story, while nancy pelosi and her husband have done pretty well buying and holding big tech stocks. They've made even more of a killing trading options. The website unusualwhales.com tracks the pelosi, family's investments and estimated their returns from options trading in 2020 and 2021. of the eight options trades we have.

Data on pelosi was profitable on seven of them and made an average return of 66. Almost all the options trades were executed by nancy pelosi's husband, paul pelosi in june of 2021. Paul pelosi went all in on nvidia spending, 1.5 million on call options within one week of pelosi. Buying these calls the senate passed a massive bill which would provide 52 billion dollars of subsidies and incentives to the domestic semiconductor industry.

Nvidia is a company that could potentially benefit from government grants and subsidies when and if this bill is ever signed into law. After the senate vote, the stock rallied 20 over the next month, bagging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gains for the pelosi's. It's very difficult to prove that pelosi was utilizing insider information to inform her or her husband's trades. It's always possible that they analyzed his talks purely based on publicly available information.

For example, republican senator richard burr sold all of his stocks right before the market crash. In february of 2020., he claimed that he was only following news about the coronavirus on cnbc. The fact that he was also receiving classified briefings on the subject supposedly had no impact on his trading decisions. But even if this is true, the stockholdings of members of congress brings up another serious concern.

The pelosi family owns millions of dollars worth of apple, microsoft and google stock. If the house considers anti-trust legislation to break up any of these companies, pelosi could stand to lose. Hundreds of thousands of dollars - it's not a stretch, to think that this could influence her decisions as speaker of the house. The idea of the stock act is that is designed to provide public scrutiny, so we can monitor trading activity and see if there are any suspicious trades, but it's impossible to completely eliminate insider trading.

Even if you can prevent people from trading on insider information, you can't prevent them from not trading. Let's say hypothetically that congress is considering legislation to break up facebook. If you already own facebook shares, it might be too obvious if you sell them before this is made public. What, if you don't own any shares, but you are planning to buy some.

You can change your plans and not buy the shares. Nobody can prove any wrongdoing. Public company ceos, financial news anchors and many other professions have very strict rules about when they can buy or sell stocks. Most news anchors on financial media channels, like cnbc or bloomberg, are completely barred from owning individual stocks.

Members of congress are, for the most part, completely free to buy and sell whatever they like whenever they like, and for some of them this has been a very lucrative proposition, alright guys that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about nancy pelosi's trading activities? Should members of congress be allowed to trade individual stocks? Let us know in the comments section below, as always. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see in the next one wall, street millennial signing out.