U.S. Congress Needs to Crack Down on Insider Trading

180+ Senators or Representatives Traded Stock on Special Access to Information

Are you surprised to find out that some people actually do know what's going to happen next? Well, Members of Congress, 18% of them are engaging in insider trading, according to research from The New York Times. 183 senators or representatives did a stock trade in the past three years and more than half of them sat on committees that gave them insight into the companies whose shares they bought or sold.

For example, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, he traded cattle prices. He's on the Agriculture Committee. Bob Gibbs of Ohio, on the House Oversight Committee. He bought shares of a drug company while the committee was investigating it. The wife of Congressman Alan Lowenthal of California, she sold shares, Boeing, one day before his committee in the House, released damaging findings about those two fatal air crashes of the 737. 

You know, members of the Congress are not allowed to trade on inside information. But according to The New York Times, it looks like hundreds of them are doing exactly that. You and I might have to struggle a little more deeply than those in Congress. We need to recognize the economic environment we're in. We need to be prepared properly for our portfolios and our personal finances. You don't have an advisor giving you help right now? Now is the time you get one.

Political Mayhem Now Spawning Politics-Inspired ETFs

What's going on in Congress is getting so silly that a mutual fund company called Subversive Capital Advisors has now issued two new ETFs. Unusual Whales, Subversive Democratic Trading ETF and Unusual Whales, Subversive Republican

Trading ETF. The first ETF has a ticker symbol of NANC, and the Republican version is KRUZ. Both allusions to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

This is a dumb idea. They're basically saying if members of congress are trading on inside info, you ought to do what they do, and you'll get rich like they were getting rich. It's dumb. Members of Congress have 45 days before they have to publicly report their transactions. By the time you try to trade on it, the data will be stale.

But it's quite a commentary, isn't it, that somebody is creating a couple of ETFs to trade on the activity of members of Congress and their illegal insider trading activity? And just to illustrate how political the world of investing has become, there are now two ETFs that explicitly seek to pressure companies to drop their efforts to diversify their workforces and cancel their pledges to address climate change. It all adds up to the mixture of money and politics in a way we haven't seen before, and we can expect this to continue, and that… is the Truth About Your Future.