As a congress trading strategy, following one member is thin. Most of them trade rarely, so you spend most of the year in cash waiting for a filing. The obvious fix is to follow several at once.
So which several? That's the entire question, and it's easy to answer dishonestly.
Two baskets
We ran two five-member baskets on identical rules — every disclosed buy from any member of the basket opens a position at 5% of account equity, entered at the first price available after that filing became public, exited when that member sells.
Basket A — the five best, chosen with full hindsight. Debbie Dingell, Michael Conaway, Sheldon Whitehouse, Josh Gottheimer, Pete Sessions. You could only have assembled this list by already knowing the answer.
Basket B — the five most prolific filers. David Perdue, Josh Gottheimer, Gilbert Cisneros, Thomas MacArthur, Tommy Tuberville. Chosen purely on how often they file, which needs no returns data at all — you could have picked these on day one.
The result
| Basket A (hindsight) | Basket B (pickable in advance) | |
|---|---|---|
| Period | 2018–2026 | 2015–2026 |
| Positions opened | 1,871 | 3,622 |
| Strategy return | +165.5% | +221.3% |
| S&P 500, same window | +206.8% | +350.0% |
| Excess over the index | −41.4 | −128.6 |
| Maximum drawdown | 33.6% | 37.2% |
Both lost. The basket assembled with full hindsight — the five best members, chosen by already knowing the answer — still finished 41 points behind an index fund. The one you could actually have picked in advance finished 129 points behind.
That is the finding, and it is a blunter one than we expected. There is no version of this idea that works: not following one member, not following five, not even following the five who turned out best.
This table used to say the opposite, and the reason matters
An earlier version of this article reported Basket A at +5,206% and an excess of +4,787 points, and used a whole-corpus run showing +56,838,195% to illustrate "unbounded compounding of a high hit rate".
All of that was one bug. Our engine drained its fill queue in filing order, so a single planned entry whose ticker had a dead price series blocked every entry behind it. Accounts froze for years, then executed the backlog at original prices with current cash — booking years of appreciation with no market exposure in between. The 56-million-percent figure was not compounding. It was that dam, at scale.
We had even written a confident explanation for the suspiciously small drawdowns: mostly-cash accounts can't fall far. The accounts weren't cash-heavy. They were stopped. Corrected, these baskets run at 33–37% drawdowns, which is what an equity strategy actually looks like.
What a combined strategy genuinely fixes
Setting the inflated absolutes aside, basketing does solve the real problem it was meant to solve:
- Fewer idle stretches. One member might file a handful of times a year. Five file constantly — Basket B opened 3,860 positions where a typical single member manages a few hundred.
- Less single-member risk. 152 of 153 individual members underperformed the index. Pooling several dilutes the chance of picking a disastrous one — it does not manufacture an edge that isn't there.
- Smoother results. More concurrent positions, less dependence on any one call.
What it doesn't fix is the disclosure lag — you're still acting a median 28 days late on every single entry, no matter how many members you follow — or the selection problem, which basketing arguably makes worse by giving you five chances to pick with hindsight instead of one.
How to do this without fooling yourself
If you want to try a combined strategy, the discipline that matters is choosing the members by a rule you can state before looking at returns. "The five who file most often." "Everyone on a given committee." "Everyone in one chamber." Then run it, and accept the answer.
The moment you pick the basket from a leaderboard, you have built Basket A — and on the corrected engine even Basket A lost. That is the cleanest evidence here: hindsight, the strongest possible advantage, was not enough.
Build and run your own basket — up to ten members.
The fine print
Entry at the first open after each filing became public; 5% of account equity per position; exits mirror each member's own disclosed sales; a member's sale closes only their own copied position. Options are modelled as purchases of the underlying, since filings disclose no strike or expiry. Runs on adjusted closes, so dividends are reinvested; taxes, market impact and commission are not modelled. Absolute returns are model outputs subject to the compounding caveat above and are not achievable returns. Educational analysis, not investment advice.