No portfolio in American politics is watched more closely. There are accounts, newsletters and at least one ETF built on the premise that following Nancy Pelosi's disclosures is an edge.
We tested it the only way that means anything: buying each disclosed purchase at the first price available after the filing became public — because that is the earliest moment any member of the public could have acted.
The result
| Disclosed buys | 75 |
| Simulated purchases filled | 64 |
| Period | Nov 2014 – Aug 2026 |
| Copy-strategy return | 80.2% |
| S&P 500 over the same window | 356.3% |
| Difference | −276.0 points |
| Median disclosure lag | 21 days |
A frozen run, not a live one: $10k start, every disclosed buy sized at 5% of equity and entered at the first open after it became public, mirroring the member's own disclosed exits. Past results, not a performance claim.
Copying the filings roughly doubled the money over eleven and a half years — while the index more than quadrupled it. If the reason to follow these filings is to do better than the market, this portfolio did not come close.
An earlier version of this page said +340%
It is worth being blunt about that rather than restating the table quietly.
Our engine consumed its fill queue in filing order, and a single planned entry whose ticker had a dead price series blocked everything queued behind it. Accounts froze, then executed years of backlog at original prices with current cash. On this record it inflated the return roughly fourfold and put her 16th; the corrected engine puts her 96th of 153.
In context: across all 153 rankable members, exactly 1 beat the index, and the typical member trailed it by 230.1 points. She is not unusual in losing to it. She is unusual only in how closely she is watched.
What she actually bought
The disclosed buys concentrate hard in large-cap US technology, which is exactly what the reputation suggests:
| Ticker | Buys |
|---|---|
| AAPL | 12 |
| NVDA | 11 |
| DIS | 6 |
| HTZ | 6 |
| CRM | 4 |
| AMZN | 4 |
| MSFT | 4 |
| GOOGL | 3 |
| PANW | 3 |
| AVGO | 2 |
Seventy-five buys in eleven years is a low trade count by congressional standards — Josh Gottheimer's filings carry 943. This is a concentrated, slow-moving book, and it leaves the copy portfolio only 38.1% invested on average: long stretches sit in cash waiting for a filing, while the index compounds every day. That gap is most of the 276.0 points.
The two caveats that actually matter
These aren't footnotes. They change what the number means.
1. Nearly a third of the buys were options
30.7% of the disclosed purchases were options, against a corpus-wide average of 1.6%. That's the highest concentration of any well-known member except Tommy Tuberville.
A filing discloses a ticker, a date and a dollar band. It does not disclose a strike or an expiry — so an option purchase cannot literally be copied. Our simulation buys the underlying shares instead.
That is the right model for the question "what could I have done with this information?" It is the wrong model for "what did she make?" A long-dated call that goes right returns several times what the shares do. Flattening it to a share purchase strips out exactly the leverage that produced the reputation.
So: the 80.2% is a fair statement about copying the filings. It is not an estimate of her actual returns, and it is almost certainly well below them.
2. Most of the trading isn't hers
110 of the 128 transactions on these filings are marked as the spouse's, not the member's. Congressional disclosure is a household-level regime, so "Nancy Pelosi's trades" is a headline convenience. The trader is Paul Pelosi, and has been throughout.
Would copying it have worked?
Mechanically, on these rules, no — you'd have finished 276.0 points behind an index fund, having taken concentrated single-stock risk and a 40.6% drawdown to get there, and having waited a median of 21 days after each trade to find out about it.
The disclosure lag is the quiet reason. A median 21-day gap means the first move in a position has usually already happened before you can read about it. When the filings cluster in fast-moving mega-cap tech, that first move is often the significant part.
The fine print
Simulation enters at the first open after each filing became public, sizes every position at 5% of account equity, and mirrors the member's own disclosed exits. Options are modelled as purchases of the underlying (see above). Amounts are disclosed as bands, never exact sizes, so equal weighting is an assumption the filings force. Runs on adjusted closes, so dividends are reinvested; taxes, market impact and commission are not modelled. This is an analysis of public filings, not a claim about anyone's conduct, and it is educational content rather than investment advice.
Run it yourself, or combine several members into one strategy: congress trading backtester.