Congress beat the market in 2024. Our data says the market did the work
In January 2025, a report from Unusual Whales was widely covered for a striking finding: more than 20 members of Congress roughly doubled the S&P 500's +24.9% return for 2024, and a handful more than doubled the value of their portfolios outright.
We have the same disclosures. We get a different answer, and the reason is not that either set of numbers is wrong. The two are measuring different things, and only one of them is a measure of stock picking.
Two questions that sound identical
The year-in-review version asks: did the value of this member's portfolio rise more than the index? It takes every holding, including positions bought years ago and never touched, estimates the change in value over the calendar year, and compares the total to the S&P 500.
We ask: was the decision to buy this stock any good? We take each disclosed purchase, price it on its transaction date, and measure what it did over the following three months against its own sector's benchmark ETF over exactly those dates.
The difference matters most for the members at the top of a yearly table. The report's highest performer, Rep. David Rouzer, had not bought or sold a single stock since 2022, and most of his gain came from shares bought years earlier, among them Nvidia. That is a real change in wealth. It contains no trading decision made that year, and no method that scores decisions can or should credit it.
The same year, measured against sectors
Cutting our own data to buys made during 2024 alone — 708 purchases by 23 tracked members, each old enough to carry a three-month figure:
| 2024 buys | Average at 3 months |
|---|---|
| Raw return | +3.15% |
| Against their own sectors | −0.04% |
Raw, the buys made money. Against the sectors they were made in, they came to −0.04% — near enough to nothing.
That is the whole of the disagreement. Compared with the S&P 500, a year of buying technology in 2024 looks like skill. Compared with technology, it looks like being in technology.
Where the 2024 gains actually came from
The report attributes the year's gains to big tech, and our data agrees on the holdings: the most-bought names in 2024 were NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, and 45% of all 2024 buys were mega-caps — the handful of companies almost any portfolio holds.
| 2024 buys | Number | Raw return | vs sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mega-cap | 317 | +2.18% | −0.79% |
| Everything else | 391 | +3.93% | +0.56% |
The mega-cap buys carried the raw return and still trailed their own sectors by 0.79%. Buying Nvidia in 2024 made money. So did buying the technology sector, by slightly more.
Member by member
Of the 26 members in that report's table that we also track, 17 made at least 3 scoreable purchases during 2024. Their portfolio change for the year sits beside what their actual 2024 buying did against the sectors it went into:
| Member | Their 2024 portfolio | Buys we could score | Ours, vs sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nancy Pelosi | +71.0% | 4 | +5.24% |
| Jonathan L. Jackson | +43.1% | 20 | +0.03% |
| Maria Elvira Salazar | +38.2% | 5 | +12.54% |
| Dan Newhouse | +36.5% | 17 | −10.80% |
| Markwayne Mullin | +28.0% | 22 | +8.96% |
| Josh Gottheimer | +21.8% | 164 | −1.54% |
| Thomas H. Kean, Jr. | +21.2% | 13 | +1.27% |
| Kevin Hern | +18.1% | 38 | +0.85% |
| Jared Moskowitz | +16.3% | 63 | −1.21% |
| John James | +14.9% | 16 | +6.04% |
| Rick Larsen | +13.7% | 5 | −0.30% |
| Virginia Foxx | +12.3% | 48 | +8.22% |
| John Boozman | +12.0% | 4 | +1.53% |
| Sheldon Whitehouse | +11.4% | 6 | −4.15% |
| Rick W. Allen | +10.7% | 4 | +8.38% |
| Tommy Tuberville | +5.7% | 25 | −8.70% |
| Shelley Moore Capito | +3.5% | 8 | −4.19% |
Pelosi's figure is the household portfolio change given in the report's coverage rather than in its published table; the rest are from the table.
In that table, 7 of 17 members trailed the sectors they bought into while their portfolios rose over the same year. The ordering of the two columns has almost nothing in common, which is what you would expect if one of them is mostly measuring what the market did to holdings a member already had.
Nancy Pelosi is the clearest case. Her household's portfolio was reported up 71% for 2024, the number that drew most of the coverage. We could score four purchases made that year. Both figures are accurate; only one of them is about a decision taken in 2024.
What about committee access?
A yearly table cannot answer the question underneath the coverage — whether proximity to legislation is worth anything — because a portfolio's annual change does not know which committee anyone sits on.
We flag buys where the stock's sector falls under a committee the member sits on. In 2024 alone, those Notable buys came to +0.05% against their sectors, against +0.08% for buys with no committee overlap: no gap worth the name.
Across our full five-year window the gap does appear, and it runs the opposite way to the intuition: Notable buys came to −2.67% against their sectors, against +0.10% for buys with no committee overlap, a spread of 2.77 percentage points. The whole range is below zero: Notable buys did worse, and the gap is unlikely to be chance.
That is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the story a table of big annual gains implies. Committee overlap remains a reason to look closely at a trade. On this evidence it is not a reason to expect the trade to have done well. How sure we are of that.
Where the two methods agree
- Big tech drove the year. Both datasets point at the same handful of names.
- The committee-overlap cases are the ones worth naming. The report singled out purchases by members sitting on committees with power over the company in question. That is exactly the pattern our Notable tag applies to every trade rather than to selected examples.
- Disclosures are a blunt instrument. The report notes that many holdings sit in index funds or accounts run by outside managers, and that spouses' assets must be disclosed as the member's own. Rep. David Rouzer's chief of staff, Anna McCormack, told The Independent that the congressman "has not purchased or sold a single stock asset since 2022" and "adheres to all House ethics rules and all financial reporting regulations", adding that "using a methodology that predicts unrealized gains creates a deceptive view of reality, leading to misinformation instead of transparency". Taken on its own terms, that objection is an argument for scoring individual, dated purchases — which is what we do.
What we cannot see
Our method has the mirror-image limitation, and it is a real one. We score purchases of individual stocks on the NYSE and Nasdaq, made inside our window, by the 36 most active traders we track — not all 535 members, not funds, not options, and not a position bought in 2019 and still held. Most of the wealth in that annual table sits in exactly the place our numbers cannot reach.
So the two findings are compatible. Members of Congress did well in 2024. The buying they did in 2024 did not beat the sectors they were buying into. Both sentences are true, and only the second one is about picking stocks.
Figures recalculated nightly. Our 2024 slice covers 708 scored buys; the full dataset covers 5,460. Source for the annual portfolio figures: Unusual Whales' 2024 congressional trading report, as tabulated by The Independent, "Dozens of Congress members outperformed the stock market in 2024", 13 January 2025. The full methodology and the underlying data are public.