The old adage about investing is that, unless you are, say, Warren Buffett, you can’t beat the market. But that’s not strictly true. Many members of Congress post excellent earnings. Consider Brian Higgins, the former Democratic congressman from New York, who quit in February: his portfolio went up 238.9 per cent in 2023. Three Republicans—Mark Green, Garret Graves, and David Rouzer—more than doubled their money. (Trading individual stocks is legal for Congress members; trading on inside info isn’t, but prosecutions are rare.) Some have demonstrated exquisite timing. Just before the pandemic, Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, sold off as much as $1.7 million in stocks. Two weeks later, the market tanked.
Not long afterward, Chris Josephs and a few friends started a social-media app called Iris, focussed on stock-market transactions for the casual investor. But its users weren’t impressed with one another’s returns. “Everyone kept demanding, ‘I want to trade what Nancy Pelosi trades,’” Josephs said recently. The Iris team came up with Autopilot, a choose-your-own-money-manager app. One of the most popular features is the Pelosi Tracker, which allows users to copy the top ten stock picks made by Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. Your portfolio buys when he buys and sells when he sells—as soon as she reports the trades, within the forty-five days required by law. The tracker was up forty-five per cent last year. (A spokesman for Pelosi said that she doesn’t own any stocks and isn’t involved in any of her husband’s transactions.) Other portfolios offered by Autopilot: Buffett (up ten per cent), Bill Ackman (up eighteen), and Representative Dan Crenshaw, of Texas (up forty-one).
On a recent morning, Josephs, who is twenty-eight, was stuck in Los Angeles traffic in a black Lexus, on his way to the Autopilot offices, in Irvine. He had on an Autopilot-branded trucker hat, a sea-green crewneck, cargo pants, and white Pumas. He considered whose portfolio to launch next. “People are asking for Tuberville,” he said, referring to the Republican senator from Alabama. “We could do Markwayne Mullin, because he’s an interesting guy.”
At a standstill, Josephs pulled up a video he’d edited the night before. Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, had bought as much as fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Raytheon stock in September, Josephs says in the video: “And it was suspicious, because not only does he sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee but also because his buy was literally just two weeks before Hamas launched their deadly terrorist attack.” (It was slightly more than three.) He posted the video on the company’s Instagram, @politiciantradetracker, which has six hundred thousand followers. “Raytheon is literally the company that builds the Iron Dome,” he said. Mullin was up thirty-three per cent. (A spokesperson for Mullin said that he uses an “independent third-party” firm to manage his portfolio.)
At the office, Josephs pitched the Mullin portfolio to his co-founder Brian Schardt. “I would say we add another Republican, another Democrat,” Schardt said. “We gotta keep it even.”
“We just want to follow the money,” Josephs said. He perused his notifications. Tens of thousands of people had seen the Mullin video. “You’re a modern patriot, thank you,” one commented. Josephs played a clip of Tucker Carlson talking with Tulsi Gabbard, who praised the Pelosi Tracker. “I’ve got to reach out to Tulsi’s team,” he said.
According to Josephs, the point of the app isn’t solely profit—the Autopilot motto: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”—but also getting politicians banned from trading stocks. “I’d be very fine with this going away tomorrow,” he said. “We’d just figure out the next thing to do.” Is change on the way? Josephs brought up Matt Gaetz, the grandstanding Republican congressman from Florida. “He has a bill with A.O.C. to ban it.”
Around noon, Josephs met his partners in a conference room to discuss the next launch. “This man, Markwayne Mullin, is making a ton of trades,” he said. A TV screen showed his filings—fifty thousand dollars here, a hundred thousand there. “See, this guy’s perfect,” Josephs said. “Makes headlines, pretty controversial, Republican, so it’s not full Democrat.” He played a clip of Mullin at a hearing in November, challenging the Teamsters’ boss to a fight (“Well, stand your butt up, then”). “So we use that video to drop it, put some music behind it, like Avicii,” Josephs said.
Lawyers had advised the Autopilot team to explain how they chose the stocks; they picked Mullin’s fifteen largest holdings by value, then by market cap. Josephs typed his positions—semiconductors, pharma, Big Tech—into a spreadsheet. “He seems to be well diversified,” Josephs said. Then he noticed shares of Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity company with several federal contracts. He laughed: “Same as Pelosi!”♦
