Exhibit 764

Relief Rally: Senators as Feckless as the Rest of Us at Stock Picking (NBER Working Paper 26975)

Exhibit 764 · Research paper (not peer reviewed)

Relief Rally: Senators as Feckless as the Rest of Us at Stock Picking (NBER Working Paper 26975)

Stocks sold following the January 24th COVID-19 briefing do underperform the market by a statistically significant 9 percent while stocks purchased during this period underperform by 3 percent.

Senators' trades 2012 to March 2020. Purchases slightly underperform industry-and-size matched stocks; no industry-specific skill tied to committees; neither party's senators show skill at buying; sales by Republican senators underperform by 50 bp over three months; sales after the 24 January 2020 briefing underperform by 9 percent.

Source: Belmont, Sacerdote, Sehgal and Van Hoek, NBER
Date: April 2020
Quoted from: Abstract
Grade: Primary record
Document: https://www.nber.org/papers/w26975
Accessed: 2026-11-09
Cited by: Findings citing this exhibit

Cited by

Finding POL-4.11: Open question Studies of the period after 2012 disagree: Chen and Sacerdote (2026) find 2012-2023 portfolios underperform or at best match benchmarks, Belmont and colleagues (2020) report that stocks senators sold after the 24 January 2020 briefing underperformed the market by 9 percent, and Wei and Zhou (2025) find that lawmakers outperform peers by 47 percentage points a year after reaching party leadership.