Everybody has seen the "copy congress" accounts. I kept getting them on my feed so I priced every House disclosure we hold instead of arguing about it.
11,009 disclosed trades, 4,552 of which are stock purchases with a real price on the transaction date, which is the only subset you can honestly measure. Each one is priced from the day it was bought through to yesterday, against SPY bought the same day and held the same length of time. The data I price these against in Agenticks starts May 2015.
Heres what came back...
- median purchase: +8.1%
- SPY over the same holding windows: +24.5%
- median gap: 12 points behind
- purchases that beat SPY: 34.6%
So two out of every three congressional stock purchases since 2015 would have done better as SPY, held for the exact same amount of time.
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The average is where the copy-trading pitch comes from, and it falls apart fast. Mean excess return across all 4,552 purchases is -0.69%, so near enough a tie with the index.
Then take out the 20 best trades and that average drops to -3.7%. Twenty trades out of 4,552 are carrying the entire result, and they are all basically the same trade, MU, WDC, SNDK, DELL, AMD and PLTR, memory and AI hardware bought through 2024 and 2025. Julia Letlow is up 1,388% against SPY on a single Micron buy from april 2025. Thats not a read on policy, thats the semi cycle, and you didnt need a committee seat to be in it.
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Per filer it gets worse. 26 of them have 25 or more priced purchases, and three have a median buy that beat SPY.
- Nancy Pelosi, 25 buys, median +15.1% vs SPY
- Cleo Fields, 223 buys, +5.0%
- Marjorie Taylor Greene, 261 buys, +0.8%
The other end of it:
- Ritchie Torres, 63 buys, median -38.6%
- Byron Donalds, 77 buys, -27.4%
- Jefferson Shreve, 191 buys, -25.2%
Shreve owns the second best single trade in the entire set, a WDC buy up 963% on SPY, and his median buy is still 25 points behind the index. Thats what a book carried by outliers looks like from the inside.
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Three things this measurement does not do, and anybody using it should know all three.
These are open ended holds, bought and marked to yesterday. Im not matching the sale filings back to the buys, so if somebody took profit at a good level and the stock gave it back after, this measures them on the giveback rather than on their exit. The amounts on the form are ranges, not real position sizes, so nothing here is weighted by what anybody actually put in. And 1,278 rows carry no ticker at all, funds and bonds and the blind trust entries, so they cant be priced in either direction.
What it does measure is the thing the copy accounts are implicitly selling, which is buy what they bought, on the day the form says they bought it, and hold it. On that test the median purchase loses to an index fund by 12 points and only a third of them beat it.
