Once again you’re going to be shocked – shocked I tell you! – by the apparent genius of our elected officials.  According to this article in the New Yorker a professor in Georgia has done a detailed study of over 6,000 stock transactions made by US Senators between 1993-1998 and has found that the Senators outperformed the market by an average of 12% annually.  As the author says:

Over that time, senators beat the market, on average, by twelve per
cent annually. Since a mutual-fund manager who beats the market by two
or three per cent a year is considered a genius, the politicians’
ability to foresee the future seems practically divine. They did an
especially good job of picking up stocks at just the right time; their
buys were typically flat before they bought them, but beat the market
by thirty per cent, on average, in the year after.

To further enhance our grasp of the obvious the author writes:

Are senators really that smart? The authors of the study suggest a more
likely explanation: at least some senators must have been trading
“based on information that is unavailable to the public”—in other
words, they were engaged in some form of insider trading. It’s
impossible to pin down exactly how it happened, but it’s easy to
imagine senators getting occasional stock tips from corporate
supplicants, and their own work in Congress often deals with
confidential matters that have a direct impact on particular companies.

I wonder how many of them are heavily invested in energy companies these days?  Come to think of it how many are heavily invested in defense contracting companies?

Just asking.