Re: Congressional Day Traders -3 Articles on Senators' high stock profits:

[cyberpj]

Just trying to keep this info present.

1. Business Report - Enter senators, and returns go sky-high
Nov 2005

snip...
That is an impressive performance, as fund managers are thought to have the Midas touch if they regularly outperform by about 3 percent, and even hedge funds - which charge steep fees for performance - are now on average only 6 percent better than the market.

The academics who conducted the study looked at 6 000 stock transactions made by senators between 1993 and 1998. They noted that the senators did an especially good job of picking up stocks at just the right time - their buys were typically flat before they bought them, but beat the market by 30 percent, on average, in the year after.

However, it seems the senators might have been given a helping hand. Alan Ziobrowski, a professor at Georgia State University, and his colleagues concluded that at least some senators must have been trading "based on information that is unavailable to the public".

http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2984593&fSectionId=613&fSetId=662


2. New Yorker - CAPITOL GAINS - Are senators really that smart?
Oct 2005

snip...
Are senators really that smart? The authors of the study suggest a more likely explanation: at least some senators must have been trading “based on information that is unavailable to the public”—in other words, they were engaged in some form of insider trading. It’s impossible to pin down exactly how it happened, but it’s easy to imagine senators getting occasional stock tips from corporate supplicants, and their own work in Congress often deals with confidential matters that have a direct impact on particular companies.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051031ta_talk_surowiecki


3. New York Times - First-time Senators did especially well
Feb 2004

snip...
"The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University.

He admits to being "very surprised" by his findings, which were based on 6,000 financial disclosure filings and are due to be published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

"The results suggest that senators knew when to buy their common stocks and when to sell."

First-time Senators did especially well, with their stocks outperforming by 20 per cent a year on average - a result that very few professional fund managers would be able to achieve.

http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT1075982783472.html?ex=1393131600&en=84995e065fb67b58&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

[acmejack]

1. Sweet! Thanx for the linx, my good man/woman/gender neutral being!

I appreciate the fruits of your research!

[rodeodance]

3. years of the study: between 1993 and 1998. --when did K street come

into existance?

[Zan_of_Texas]

5. I believe the K Street project started in January 1995.

.

[napi21]

2. So why did none of these articles not list any names but Frist?

Insider trading isn't an easy charge to prove, but it certainly can be done! Did they not mention any additional names because there have been NO investigations announced?

[cyberpj]

4. I think because it was around this time Frist's stock sale case made news.

These articles were considered side bars of sort then I guess.

No big deal, right?

[napi21]

6. BIG DEAL...IF there are more Senators and Reps guilty!

Insider trading is a VERY BIG DEAL, and these folks were in the perfect position to get info they shouldn't have had!

[cyberpj]

7. Yeah well.... and if we had a real media this could have been news.

Now we're stuck trying to tack it onto the Delay Frist day-trader remark to bring it back into the spotlight.

And you see what grand attention it's getting, even here, at DU.

[Neil Lisst]

8. It's going largely ignored. (But Neil, there's a whale in the Thames!)

I'm so glad the important stuff gets covered.

Congressmen are taking bribes left and right, they're using inside info on which to trade, info they have because they're creating it, but hey - there's a whale in the Thames!!

Or there's a kid who claimed to be a British Royal!

chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, snort

It's the N-ewwwwwwwwwwws.