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@profofwallstreet
Amos Nadler, PhD
Behavioral Fintech | Behavioral & Neuro Economics | x3 Founder | Researcher | (very) occasional wit
1 following12 followers
Should elected officials be allowed to trade?
The The Wall Street Journal has diligently shown that gov't officials trade regularly and use material information.

My (Prof of Wall Street) research confirms that Congress members significantly outperform the S&P even while displaying sometimes high level of investment biases.

How does this happen?

Getting in early on an informed trade can yield significant returns even if the exit is partially botched.

#sec #insidertrading #efficientmarkets

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WSJ
Congress Pushes to Police Stock Trading by Federal Officials
As lawmakers press federal agencies over officials’ stock trading, the energy secretary became the first cabinet member to signal support for banning it outright. 

Seems a bit wonky that the folks who know/control some of the macro elements can also trade on those elements.
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How does your Lone Star State House Representative trade?
I analyzed Pete Session's data and found that his performance tracks the S&P before drastically diverging and underperforming starting late 2021.

Mr. Sessions selected winning assets yet actively managed them in an alpha-destroying way by selling during the downturn.

Why?

Likely panic selling.

Was this avoidable?

Yes.

btw, I can also analyze your data to detect behavioral biases, hit me up if you want a report
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Do sports affect the stock market?
In one of my favorite papers as a grad student, Alex Edmans, Diego Garcia, and Oyvind Norli (Journal of Finance 2007) showed evidence that winning a national game (e.g., football/soccer) causes abnormal cumulative returns (CARS).

Other papers haven’t found results as robust (e.g., Christian Klein, Bernhard Zwergel, Sebastian Heiden).

So I’m taking a poll (or starting an argument, we'll see) about this World Cup about what we expect to occur as a community:
Will the home country of the World Cup winner–France or Argentina–experience CARS after the win?
42%Positive abnormal returns
57%No significant impact
0%Negative abnormal returns

7 VotesPoll ended on: 12/19/2022

Distinguishing between dips and falling knives + question
I just ran across a fund based on this ability (this is NOT an endorsement): https://www.dipetf.com/fund-summary

Dips are positive expected value while undifferentiated buying of losing assets is negative net expected value, so at high level the thesis could hold--but only if they can tell the two apart.

What I find interesting is that there is a common behavioral tendency to buy more when the price falls (either from recent highs or relative to someone's average cost basis).

In the profession this is dubbed to "average down", yet in pathological gambling this is known as "loss chasing".

Open question: How do you distinguish between an economic rationale and behavioral impulse to buy when prices fall?
What performance history/stats would be most helpful to disentangle this?

Congressional trading data: double shock
Check out the remarkable performance from Hon. Brian Mast--completely destroyed the S&P during the period under analysis.

Yet, IMHO, the quantitative behavioral insights are even more shocking:

Massive alpha was destroyed by active management bias known as the Disposition Effect–936% cumulative, 131% CAGR!

Clarification about the table below: “DE Backtest” is a counterfactual metric quantifying what performance would have been with better holding periods for winning and losing positions.
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Do politicians beat the market? OC Edition
As a followup to recent post analyzing Nancy Pelosi's data, this data is from Alan Lowenthal, who represents western Orange County in southern California.

Side note: I went to Claremont for graduate school and find this to one of the most beautiful areas in the world and has incredible surf spots.

I analyzed his trade history data (from publicly available resource/API), here are a couple of highlights:

  1. His cumulative performance beat the S&P benchmark by a whopping 11% (a 41% relative improvement)--truly impressive by professional money management standards.
  2. However, on the active management side, we find dramatic Disposition Effect (‘selling winners too soon, losers too late’) errors reducing his performance (“negative behavioral alpha”) by a dramatic 43%. Ouch.
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Do politicians beat the market?
The The Wall Street Journal has been reporting on the conflict of interest concerns about politicians trading on advanced knowledge of material insider information (article link below).

I did my own analysis of Nancy Pelosi’s data and found that:

  1. Her performance beat the S&P benchmark by 4%: not too shabby, most professionals can’t do that consistently

  1. Proprietary Disposition Effect (‘selling winners too soon, losers too late’) analysis suggests active management errors reducing her performance (“negative behavioral alpha”); performance delta is rather small relative to others I’ve analyzed

  1. Larger drawdown than S&P: makes sense given portfolio holdings




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A really interesting article Amos thanks for sharing. Regulation is the common factor that has an influence all sectors so I am not surprised to see individuals who have a certain level or insider/privileged information gain from this foresight.
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