YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Do House members' stock trades beat the market? A test of 8,900 trades

32 points Bluestein 1 hour ago 9 comments

somid3 18 minutes ago | parent

I remember reading they don't disclose the exact date and hour of the purchase and sale, so intra-day trading or tight timeline trades are impossible to measure, is that correct?

somid3 13 minutes ago | parent

I asked Claude:

Does this article take into account intraday trading or trading where the purchase and the sale occurs within 45 days?

And:

"Is there a way someone could have generated a positive revenue even though they reported as negative?"

Conclusion -- their numbers could still allow someone to make positive return even though they report mostly negative alpha

Gosh I love AI for analyzing lousy reports and articles that are inaccurate.

kennywinker 7 minutes ago | parent

The article literally says as much, you do have to read it tho. Taking claudeslop as gospel is gonna make you some mistakes.

somid3 4 minutes ago | parent

I used it as high-level analysis, I'm downloading the data to do my own analysis. Seems 12% of trades are intra-day... but that's the early data I'm seeing

collabs 6 minutes ago | parent

Sure, as long as you actually follow through and go to primary sources and do that analysis, I see no problem with using Claude as a starting point. However, please actually go to the sources it gave you and do the analysis yourself. This is way too important for someone to be able to handwave us and say we are wrong.

Tl;Dr please double check with the sources that Claude gave you?

somid3 5 minutes ago | parent

I'm downloading the data as we speak :)

kennywinker 10 minutes ago | parent

Looks like trade reports only include the date not the time: https://www.congressstock.com/trades

ummonk 11 minutes ago | parent

If you only measure median performance as this is doing, do any group of individuals' stock trades beat the market? I'd expect most of the alpha to come not from the median transaction but from a few well timed buys or sales.