Congressional Leaders See Far Higher Stock Returns Than Peers

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Friday, December 12, 2025 00:30
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6IXSTRINGJACK

Friday, December 12, 2025 12:30 AM

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Over 100 members of Congress have cosigned the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would prohibit members of Congress and their immediate families from buying and selling individual stocks. Despite broad bipartisan support, congressional leadership has not yet allowed the bill to be brought to the floor.

A new working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that stock-related gains are most concentrated among congressional leaders rather than rank-and-file lawmakers. The authors find that lawmakers who eventually rise to leadership roles perform roughly in line with comparable peers before entering leadership, but after entering leadership, they outperform those peers by an average of 47 percentage points annually.

The study, conducted by Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University and Yifan Zhou of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, identifies two main drivers of these elevated returns. The first is direct political influence, which is most apparent when the leader’s party controls the chamber. In those circumstances, lawmakers in leadership and at the top of committees are more likely to sell shares before regulatory action and to buy them before federal contracts are issued or favorable legislation is enacted.

The other is that leadership figures and top committee chairs enjoy privileged access to nonpublic signals about major companies, particularly those tied to key donors or home-state industries. As a result, their trades tend to anticipate corporate developments and deliver substantially higher returns than the broader market.

The most frequently cited example of congressional leadership producing outsized returns is former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Since the STOCK Act of 2012 was implemented, Pelosi’s investments have returned approximately 854%, far above the SPY market index return of 263%, according to Quiver Quantitative, one of the many firms that tracks Pelosi and other members’ stock trades. The STOCK Act requires public reporting of trades by members of Congress within 45 days and prohibits the use of nonpublic information for personal financial gain. However, no member of Congress has ever been criminally prosecuted under the act.

While Pelosi ranks among the top performers in congressional stock returns for senior members, Sen. Ron Wyden and his wife, Bass Wyden, posted even stronger results in 2024. At the time, Wyden chaired the Senate Finance Committee, and their public portfolio gained approximately 123.8%, far exceeding Pelosi’s ~70.9% return and the S&P 500’s 24.9% gain that year. In 2023, his return ranked among the highest at ~78.5%, exceeding the S&P 500’s 24.8% and Pelosi’s ~65.5%.

Wyden and his wife’s trading volume was comparatively modest relative to their overall holdings in both years. In 2024, they sold between $100,000 and $250,000 of UPS stock, which has since declined from $147 per share to $99 per share; in 2023, they reported no new stock purchases or sales.

Nearly all of their outsized gains trace back to stock purchased between April and November 2020, investments they have largely held. During that same period, Wyden’s wife drew scrutiny after laying off employees from her New York City bookstore, The Strand, early in the pandemic. She later accepted between $1 million and $2 million in PPP funds, even though 188 of the store’s 212 employees had already been laid off. At the same time, disclosures show she purchased between $3 million and $7.9 million in stock.

Both parties’ leadership and top committee heads tend to record outsized returns. Rank-and-file lawmakers, however, perform similarly to or worse than market indexes according to the study. In 2024, Republicans and Democrats outperformed the S&P 500 by only 1% and 6% on average, respectively, suggesting that while some at the top of the parties with greater access to information or influence, such as Wyden and Pelosi, earn substantially higher returns, many actually underperform the broader market.

Speaker Mike Johnson has

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