Only One Member of Congress Beat the Market: Out of 153 We Could Test

We backtested congress trading across the whole field, copying every member, entering at the first price available after each filing became public, same rules for everyone.

146 members cleared every threshold. 56 finished ahead of the S&P 500, 38.4% of the board.

That figure is real and it is also a trap, so the honest version of this article has to lead with the catch rather than bury it. The simulation puts 1.0% of the account into each disclosed buy and parks the rest in SPY. A member who files a handful of trades a year therefore never gets much of your money into their picks, the median member on this board had 3.9% of the account in their own positions, and the rest simply tracked the index.

Sort the board by how much was actually at stake and the answer inverts:

36 of the 56 members who "beat the market" came from the bottom row, accounts that were 0.4 points from the index in either direction because they were barely invested in anything else. Among the 26 members with 15% or more of the account committed, 4 beat it.

The list

Thomas Tuberville, by 67.4 points over five years. That is the entire list.

This list used to have thirteen names, and every one of the other twelve was our bug

An earlier version of this article ran a table of thirteen winners, led by margins of +662 and +490 points. Before that, twenty. Both are gone, and the reason is worth more than the table was.

Three separate defects in our own engine, each found only after fixing the one before it:

• No minimum history. The board ranked one member on a single day, eight buys public the day before it was computed, showing +0.03% against the index. Eleven of 194 ranked members had under a year.
• No minimum fills. Disclosed buys and copied positions are not the same number. A member could disclose five and have one priced, and be ranked on it.
• A dammed fill queue. This is the one that invented the winners. A planned entry whose ticker had a dead price series, a company renamed years earlier, leaving a stub, blocked every entry queued behind it. Accounts froze for years, then executed the whole backlog at original prices with current cash. Years of appreciation, booked risk-free, with no market exposure in between.

That last one is why the old table's top entries looked superhuman. They were not returns. They were an accounting artefact of trades that never happened in the order the simulation thought.

Fixed, the field looks like this:

Every fix moved the number the same way. That is the part we would ask you to weigh: at no point did correcting our own engine make copying Congress look better.

Restricting to members whose simulation filled at least 80% of their disclosed buys doesn't rescue it either, 42 of 120, median −2.0.

The winners who were actually invested

Stripping out the index-huggers leaves a short list, and it is not the list anyone expects, the household names are absent from it:

The best margin on the board is 67.4 points, and it belongs to a member who committed a real share of the account rather than one who sat in SPY. That is a genuine result. It is also a result you could only have collected by choosing that specific member, years ago, with no way of knowing.

Tommy Tuberville, who an earlier version of this article named as the single winner, ranks 119th on the corrected board and finished 8.8 points behind the index, with 51.7% of the account committed across 499 filled positions. That reversal was caused by our own sizing assumption, not by new filings, which is exactly the kind of fragility this section exists to flag.

A quarter of his copied book (25.1%) was options, which a filing cannot convey, no strike, no expiry, so those are bought as the underlying. His figure describes copying the filing, not what the position did.

What it does not show

It does not show anyone acting improperly. A disclosure record that outperforms is not evidence of anything except an outperforming disclosure record. Members trade for the same reasons everyone else does, frequently through managed accounts they don't direct, and often the filings belong to a spouse.

It does not predict anything. The members ahead are identifiable only in hindsight. Nothing here suggests it will be the same member next year, or that there will be one, and if picking the right member in advance were possible, that would be the product, not the leaderboard.

It does not capture options. Purchases of options are modelled as purchases of the underlying, because a filing discloses no strike or expiry. Corpus-wide that's 1.6% of buys, but for Nancy Pelosi it's 36.5% and for Tommy Tuberville 25.1%.

The number that actually matters

Not 56. The 4 of 26.

Once you require that a member's disclosures would actually have put money to work: 15% of the account or more, rather than a few percent with the balance in SPY, the field collapses to 4 winners, and the median member in that group trailed the index by 13.3 percentage points.

Following a member of Congress chosen at random has been worse than buying an index fund and ignoring it. Following one seriously has been worse still.

Run the board yourself.

The fine print

Entry at the first open after each filing became public; 1.0% of account equity per position with idle cash held in SPY; exits mirror the member's own disclosed sales. Runs on adjusted closes, so dividends are reinvested; taxes, market impact and commission are not modelled. Members need at least three disclosed buys, at least three years of history, and at least three positions the simulation could actually fill. Prices available for 90.0% of disclosed buys. Figures generated from the stored board as of 2026-08-18, and they move as filings land. Educational analysis, not investment advice, and not a claim about any individual's conduct.