On Wednesday, November 6, Finbold disclosed on Wednesday that a prominent US representative, John Rutherford, has allegedly violated the STOCK Act on more than 150 occasions through his stock trades.
Notably, Rutherford serves on the House Ethics Committee, responsible for upholding the STOCK Act, yet he has never faced an investigation for these transactions.
Surprisingly, such suspicious stock dealings by US representatives and Congress members are not uncommon. Quiver Quantitative, an alternative data platform monitoring the stock market trades of politicians, unveiled another striking revelation on the same day.
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Notably, the X account said it caught US Senator Tommy Tuberville “making more suspicious trades than any other Senator.” Interestingly, Tuberville was a loud critic of the proposal to ban congressional stock trading, saying such a move would be “ridiculous” and would “really cut back on the number of people who want to come up here and serve.”
Tuberville’s suspicious trades
In its post, Quiver Quantitative highlighted three trades made by Senator Tuberville that it deems highly suspicious.
In particular, the account said a 69-year-old politician bought stock in a Brazilian investment management company XP Inc. on April 3. Since his purchase, the stock surged more than 87%.
Additionally, the Senator made a series of purchases in the shares of ChannelAdvisor, an e-commerce company, in the period from March to July 2022. The total value of his investments in the company was around $665,000.
In less than a month, it was announced that ChannelAdvisor would be acquired by CommerceHub.
“The stock jumped over 50%, and Tuberville sold the next day.”
– Quiver Quantitative noted.
Among other assets, Tuberville also traded millions of dollars worth of commodities futures and hundreds of thousands of dollars of Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY) stock and options.
Furthermore, he traded “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of US Steel stock and options,” the account said.
All of these commodity investments were made while Tuberville was sitting on the Senate subcommittee on commodities.
Conclusion
In summary, it sounds like Tuberville “might not be willing to be a Senator if his ability to trade was taken away,” based on his comments on the proposal to ban congressional trading, Quiver said.
“I tend to believe that it would be a good thing if Congress did not have members who only wanted to serve if they were able to profit off of trading.”
– the account wrote.
Last month, Finbold reported that Congress members have been buying up war-related stocks ahead of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. The trend continued in the weeks after the strike.
