Hype check Can you get rich by copying Congress?
You've seen the pitch: "A member of the Intelligence Committee bought chips and made +122%." "+34% average returns, a 70% win rate — just mirror Congress." It's a lucrative story, sold for tens of euros a month. It's also, mostly, a magic trick. Here's how the trick works — and what the numbers say once you stop cherry-picking.
1. They show you the winners
For every "+270%" there are dozens of trades that went nowhere or lost — you just never see them. Pick the four best out of two hundred and any group looks like genius. That's survivorship bias, not an edge.
2. They forget the benchmark
"+122%" against what? If chipmakers rose across the board, the market handed almost everyone that gain. The only number that means anything is the return above the market — and it's almost always far smaller than the headline.
3. Hindsight isn't a strategy
These "signals" are chosen after the move already happened. In reality a follower can only act once a trade is disclosed — up to 45 days later. Measured honestly, from the filing date, most of the magic has already evaporated.
4. A win rate isn't an edge
In a rising market, most buys "win". A 70% win rate is unremarkable. What matters is the risk-adjusted excess return — and whether it's bigger than random noise, i.e. a confidence interval that actually clears zero.
The honest number What our own data says
Across the 12,532 most recent trades we can price, measured against the S&P 500 from the public filing date — what a follower could actually act on — here is the average market-adjusted return, with a 95% confidence interval and the sample size behind it:
| Hold | Trades | Avg excess vs S&P 500 | 95% CI | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30d | 12,532 | -0.11% | -0.28% … +0.07% | no reliable edge |
| 90d | 11,807 | -0.51% | -0.86% … -0.17% | clears zero |
| 180d | 9,997 | +0.02% | -0.60% … +0.65% | no reliable edge |
| 365d | 7,539 | +3.11% | +1.31% … +4.91% | clears zero |
Don't take our word for it. Test any slice yourself in the event-study explorer, read our public track record — hits and misses — and the calibration. Independent academic work finds the same thing: congressional trades look a lot like uninformed retail trading.
So what's the point? Accountability, not tips
If copying Congress won't make you rich, why watch it at all? Because it's about accountability, not alpha: who traded what, whose committee oversees it, the conflicts and the cross-party clusters — the why, with the statistics kept honest. The accountability core is free, forever; the paid tiers are research tools for people who want to dig, never buy/sell advice. This is a transparency tool, not an investment product — and not investment advice.