The best stock pickers in America aren’t on Wall Street. They aren’t running hedge funds, building algorithms, or pulling shifts on a trading floor. They’re sitting on the floor of Congress, drafting the laws that move the very stocks they own. And they’re beating the market by margins that make Warren Buffett look like an amateur.

Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, posts roughly a 19% annual return. An ordinary index fund returns about 10%. But a portfolio that simply mirrors the trades of members of Congress has, over the last year, returned around 33% — outpacing the S&P by nearly ten points without any of the hard work. The lawmakers pulling those numbers aren’t math geniuses or finance veterans. They’re elected officials with security clearances, committee assignments, and a steady drip of nonpublic information that the rest of the country never sees.

The Burr Blueprint

The clearest case study is Senator Richard Burr. In early February 2020, Burr — then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Health Committee — was sitting in closed-door briefings about a virus that had not yet upended American life. On February 7th, he wrote an op-ed for Fox News reassuring the public that the United States was prepared. Six days later, on February 13th, he dumped his entire stock portfolio. Up to $1.7 million in equities, sold off at the top of the market.

The market crashed. The economy shut down. Burr was clean out of the wreckage while his constituents lost their jobs and their savings. The FBI investigated. The FBI dropped the case. Burr walked.

That outcome is supposed to be impossible. The country has a specific law — the STOCK Act, short for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge — built specifically to criminalize this kind of trading by sitting lawmakers. Burr’s case is the cleanest test the law has ever faced, and the law lost.

A Pattern, Not An Exception

Burr is not the outlier. He’s the template.

Chris Kardatzke runs Quiver Quantitative, a firm that mines public disclosures to help retail investors copy congressional trades. The firm’s autopilot portfolio, which buys whatever members of Congress are buying, has comfortably beaten the broader market. And Kardatzke says the suspicious trades are evenly distributed: “We see suspicious trades on both sides of the aisle.”

The recent examples form an unmistakable pattern.

In November, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz — a member of the House Appropriations Committee and the Subcommittee on Military Construction — bought shares of ViaSat, a defense and satellite communications firm. Quiver had never seen any member of Congress touch the stock before. The next month, ViaSat was awarded part of a $4 million NASA contract, followed shortly by a Department of Defense contract. The stock rose.

Representative Susie Lee, who also sat on a military construction committee, bought shares of Rheinmetall — a German defense contractor heavily involved in U.S. Army tank modernization. No member of Congress had been seen trading the stock before. It is up roughly 250% since.

Senator Markwayne Mullin, who sits on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, bought stock in Badger Meter, a maker of automated water meters. Around the same time, the EPA issued a mandate effectively pushing American cities to switch to automated meters. The stock rose 40% over the following year. Mullin closed the position.

And in April, Marjorie Taylor Greene bought up dozens of stocks on the day of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, including Restoration Hardware, whose share price had just collapsed. When the tariffs were partially walked back over the following week, Restoration Hardware climbed roughly 30%. By Quiver’s estimates, Greene cleared around $100,000 on her tariff-week trades. She blamed her financial advisor, who, in her words, “bought the dip.”

In a 55-day stretch this year, members of Congress executed roughly 2,200 trades worth millions of dollars. Crypto trades — including meme coins — have surged in disclosures. The pattern is not subtle.

Why Nobody Goes To Jail

Insider trading is brutally hard to prosecute. It isn’t enough to show that a lawmaker held material nonpublic information and then placed a perfectly timed trade. Prosecutors have to prove the trade happened because of the information. That usually requires a phone call, a text, an email — a smoking gun. Members of Congress, as a rule, do not leave smoking guns.

So the STOCK Act, the law passed specifically to police congressional trading, has effectively become a disclosure regime and nothing more. Lawmakers report their trades. The public sees the trades. Nobody is stopped. The behavior is now legally tolerated and openly tracked. The law put a time stamp on the corruption and called it transparency.

The Conflict Underneath

Set aside the criminal question for a moment. Even if every suspicious trade is somehow innocent — even if members of Congress are simply gifted investors with uncanny timing — the deeper problem doesn’t go away.

House Democrats, according to Quiver’s data, are heavily invested in tech: Nvidia, Google, Apple, Palantir. These names appear over and over in the disclosures. It is not difficult to see why meaningful regulation of those companies has been so hard to deliver. Members of Congress are being asked to vote against their own portfolios. Predictably, they don’t.

That conflict isn’t theoretical. It shapes legislation, hearings, oversight, and enforcement priorities. Consciously or not, lawmakers protect the businesses they own. That is precisely the conflict the rules around insider trading and government ethics were designed to prevent — and it is operating in plain sight.

A Ban Has Broad Support. Congress Won’t Vote.

The political math here is strange. The vast majority of Americans support banning congressional stock trading. Speaker Mike Johnson is on record supporting a ban. President Trump has said he would sign one if it landed on his desk. Roughly 19 bills addressing the issue have been introduced across the House and Senate.

Not one has been brought to a full floor vote.

The internal debate has fractured into three camps. The first insists nothing is wrong — that the STOCK Act works fine and a ban would be a “completely unnecessary piece of legislation.” The second wants a real ban that extends to spouses and immediate family. The third agrees there’s a problem but wants to carve out exemptions, allow blind trusts, or exclude family members. The disagreements are enough to keep any bill from reaching the floor.

Some of the resistance is openly self-interested. One lawmaker, defending the status quo on the floor, told colleagues: “I don’t know how many people in the audience, how many of you don’t want to make money? Anybody want to be poor? I don’t.”

The defense is striking less for its candor than for what it implies — that a $174,000 congressional salary, more than double the average American household income, is somehow a hardship that requires supplemental trading on confidential briefings. Speaker Johnson has gestured at the same logic, noting that congressional pay has been frozen since 2009 and is now worth 31% less in real terms. The argument is essentially that lawmakers need to trade on inside information to maintain their lifestyles.

Meanwhile, the live debate in Congress has narrowed to whether a ban should also cover the President and Vice President — which, of course, it should — and whether spouses count. Both questions are being used to stall a vote on the underlying ban.

What Reform Would Actually Look Like

The fix is not complicated. Members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children should be barred from trading individual stocks. Existing holdings should be liquidated or moved into truly blind trusts managed by independent fiduciaries — not the kind of “blind” trusts that politicians peek into. The rule should extend to the executive branch. Enforcement should carry teeth: forced divestiture, disgorgement of gains, and removal from committee assignments tied to the underlying conflict.

None of this requires proving criminal intent. It eliminates the conflict instead of trying to police it after the fact. It treats the disease, not the symptom.

Until then, the cleanest investment strategy available to ordinary Americans may be the one the cynics already use: open one of the apps that tracks Nancy Pelosi’s trades, or Quiver’s congressional autopilot, and ride along with the people writing the laws. It is a damning workaround. It is also, at the moment, working.

The STOCK Act has failed. Public trust in elected officials has not been restored. The corruption is no longer hidden — it is disclosed, time-stamped, and ignored. The country does not need another study or another bipartisan working group. It needs a vote. Until one happens, the most lucrative seat in American finance will continue to be a seat in the United States Congress.

This article is based on reporting by More Perfect Union. View the original video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsrAZ0gnkPo.