Friday, May 27, 2011

Who are the worst inside traders?

Given what the media has historically printed, you might guess that corporate executives or hedge fund managers might be the worst inside traders, especially given the recent conviction of one hedge fund manager for egregious insider trading.

You might be wrong.  Apparently, Democratic members of Congress have outperformed the market by about 9% a year, which is something that hedge fund managers and mutual fund managers fail to do about 95% of the time.  Worse yet, Senators out perform the House of Representatives by about 4% per year.  Unfortunately, these aspiring Warren Buffetts are not, apparently, liable to insider trading laws.  Hopefully a bill introduced by my Congressman, Tim Walz, will get some traction due to this apparent abuse of insider information by his Democratic colleagues.

It's telling as well that, despite apparent favoritism in investing, many Senators are not financially well off, and their names have appeared in scandals related to favoritism in home loans.  Yet more reason to ask whether a politician knows how to handle money before you vote for him.

2 comments:

Gino said...

not well off? how many of them leave office and retire to a mobile home?

Bike Bubba said...

The trick is that they've got a generous government pension, and many also end up lobbying for big bucks. When you take a look at what they save on that $160k/year, it's generally not much, though.

In other words, the system covers for the failures of financial losers. We need to go to a 401k system for Congress, to put it mildly.