Does Congress Actually Beat the Stock Market?
It is one of the most common assumptions in finance: that members of Congress, with their committee access and front-row view of policy, must be unusually good stock pickers. It makes for a great headline. The data tells a more boring, more honest story.
For the most part, no, Congress does not beat the market. When you price each disclosed purchase against the S&P 500 over the 90 days that follow, the typical member lands near or below the index, the same place most active traders land. A minority genuinely outperform, and identifying them is the entire point, but the body as a whole is not a magic signal.
Of the 62 members with enough priced purchases to measure right now, only 23 (37%) show positive average alpha versus the S&P. The rest match or trail simply buying the index.
Why the “Congress beats the market” story sticks
A handful of well-timed, well-publicized trades, a chair of the right committee buying a defense contractor before a budget vote, get enormous attention, and survivorship does the rest: the winners are memorable and the losers are not. But an average is built from every trade, not the screenshots. Most disclosed purchases are unremarkable, and plenty of members trade actively while doing no better than an index fund. Trading often is not the same as trading well.
How this is measured
For each disclosed purchase, Coldpine takes the stock’s return over the next 90 days and subtracts the S&P 500’s return over the same window. Averaged across a member’s purchases, that difference is their alpha. We include members with at least 5 priced purchases that have a full 90-day window. It is a point-in-time measure of disclosed buys, not realized profit-and-loss or current holdings. See the full methodology.
The exceptions are the interesting part
A few members do clear the bar convincingly. Mark Green currently leads, with disclosed purchases beating the S&P by an average of +15.8% over 90 days. The question worth your attention is not “does Congress beat the market” in the aggregate, it’s which members do, and whether they keep doing it. That is what the ranking is for, see the full list of members who beat the market and the live leaderboard.
Coldpine measures who actually trades well, and scores every disclosed trade so you see which ones matter.
Coldpine is a publisher of intelligence on public Congressional disclosures. Alpha is a point-in-time measure of disclosed purchases vs the S&P 500, not realized profit-and-loss, current holdings, or a prediction of future returns. This is informational only, not investment advice, and not a suggestion to buy, sell, or copy anyone’s trades.