Do Congress's Stock Trades Beat the Market? NANC vs GOP, Tested

Members of the US Congress write the laws that move companies, and they're allowed to trade those companies' shares. They just have to report each trade within 45 days.

So in February 2023 two ETFs launched to copy them. NANC buys what Democrats report buying, and GOP buys what Republicans report. We followed $10,000 in each from their first close to 6 November 2026.

NANC vs GOP at a glance

Both funds come from the same issuer and work the same way. They read the trade reports lawmakers file, then buy more of what's bought often, in size, or by several members at once. Small one-off buys and recent sales get little weight or none.

Look at the top rows of NANC and you've seen most of the fund. Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple and Meta add up to 33% of it. In GOP the same six are 6.5%, and it spreads its money across banks, energy, industrials and even a Bitcoin ETF.

What $10,000 became in each

So the Democrats' fund won, by $559 on $10,000. The Republicans' fund lost by $2,119. And if you'd held both, to copy all of Congress, you'd have ended up $749 behind a plain S&P 500 fund.

The issuer's own numbers agree. From launch to 31 October 2026, NANC returned 20.86% a year at its market price, GOP 16.11% and the S&P 500 with dividends 19.44%.

Is NANC's lead skill, or just tech?

This is the real question. Big tech had a huge run from 2023. Any fund that leaned on it would have beaten the S&P 500, whoever picked the stocks.

So we built a lookalike. We took every daily move of NANC and found the mix of SPY and QQQ that tracked it most closely. The answer was 69% SPY and 31% QQQ, rebalanced every day. NANC moved with it closely, straying by about 4.3% a year.

Then we compared them. $10,000 in the lookalike became $19,517. In NANC it became $19,126. The two cheap index funds won by $391, and they'd cost you about $12 a year in fees on $10,000, against $72.

GOP didn't look like tech at all. No amount of QQQ brought it closer, and it moved less than the market, about 0.84 times SPY's daily moves. It held little of the big tech that led the market, which explains most of GOP's gap.

Neither result points to a stock-picking edge. NANC's win came from what it owned a lot of, and you can buy that more cheaply elsewhere.

Year by year

NANC beat SPY in three of four years. Its best year against SPY was 2023, by 4.6 points, which was also the year QQQ rose 33%. GOP beat SPY in one: 2026.

2026 has flipped it. GOP is up 11.4%, ahead of SPY's 8.7%, while NANC is up only 5.3%. Over the last twelve months NANC made 6.0% and SPY 10.9%.

That's how a tilt behaves. On 1 October 2026 NANC was $1,641 ahead of SPY on $10,000. Tech then fell in October, and five weeks later the lead was $559. It gave back 66% of it.

We also checked every one-year hold, starting on each trading day. NANC beat SPY in 65% of them, by a median of 1.1 points. GOP beat it in 33%, and the median hold trailed by 3.2 points. These holds overlap, so treat them as a picture of the record, not as odds.

Why copying Congress is harder than it sounds

The law behind these funds is the STOCK Act of 2012. It makes members of Congress report any stock trade over $1,000 within 30 days of learning about it, and no later than 45 days after the trade. Spouses and dependent children count too.

• You're always late. If a lawmaker did know something, the price may have moved by the time the report is public, and the fund can only buy after that.
• The reports are rough. They give a range of values, not an exact amount, so NANC works off the middle of each range.
• Options trades don't count. Some of the most talked-about lawmaker trades were options, and NANC's prospectus says it skips them.
• Most trades don't mean much. Plenty are routine buys of the biggest companies in the market, which is why NANC looks so much like a tech-heavy index fund.
• It costs more. NANC charges 0.72% a year and GOP 0.73%. SPY charges 0.0945% and QQQ 0.18%.

NANC doesn't trade often, either. Its turnover was 10% in its last full fiscal year, so most of what it holds stays put. It's closer to an index fund with a tilt than a fast copy of each trade.

What the research says

The idea comes from a 2004 study by Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd and Ziobrowski. It looked at senators' trades from 1993 to 1998 and found that a portfolio copying their purchases beat the market by 0.85% a month. That's about 11% a year.

Later studies didn't find it. Eggers and Hainmueller (2013) looked at trades and holdings from 2004 to 2008 and found the average member of Congress would have done better in a passive index fund.

Belmont, Sacerdote, Sehgal and Van Hoek (2022) looked at senators from 2012 to March 2020, after the STOCK Act. The stocks senators bought did slightly worse than similar stocks, by 0.28% over three months. They found no sign that senators picked stocks well in the areas their committees cover.

That doesn't mean no lawmaker has ever traded on a tip. It means that, taken as a group, their trades haven't beaten the market since the 1990s, and NANC and GOP fit that.

What happens if Congress bans trading?

It nearly happened this year. On 22 July 2026 the House passed H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act by 232-198. It would stop members and their families buying new stocks, though they could keep what they own.

On 30 September 2026 it failed in the Senate, 53-47, short of the 60 votes it needed. Other bills are still waiting.

The funds list this as a risk. If lawmakers stop trading, there's nothing new to copy, and the funds would hold whatever they last bought.

Outside the US

Both funds are US-listed. In the UK and the EU, retail investors usually can't buy US ETFs like these, because they don't publish the key information document local rules require. Many brokers in other countries don't sell them either. If you just want the tilt that helped NANC, every major market has funds that track the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100.

So do Congress's stock trades beat the market?

As a group, no. The Democrats' fund beat the S&P 500 because it was heavy in big tech during a big-tech boom. The Republicans' fund wasn't, and lagged. Put them together and you trail the market.

If you like NANC's record, what you like is its tilt. You can buy that directly with 69% in an S&P 500 fund and 31% in a Nasdaq-100 fund, with no 45-day lag and much lower fees.