senator-filings

Finance and crypto

stock trading data analysis

SHOW HN2020

350points
80comments
#107of 3,028 in 2020
Top 4%of 2020 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

5 positive, 17 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 3 critical, out of 26 comments about the project. Thread score +0.07.

Idea: 5 for, 2 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Transparency tool that is needed and could reduce corruption.

    From 2 comments
    • This is amazing transparency that we needed. With this tool, you may have really changed the future of America to that of one that’s less corrupt. Bravo!
      rasengan on HN
    • Nice idea! This should be an easily navigable web app that every common person should be able to use. Thanks for building.
      filtercoffee37 on HN
  • Useful data for an app or project.

    From 2 comments
    • This is nice. I think I will integrate it in my new stock events app. It's exactly the kind of content that belongs there. Thanks!
      davidkuennen on HN
    • That would be great! I am interested in the data. Thanks
      malshe on HN

Objections

  • Senators' trades are small and may show no insider edge.

    From 2 comments
    • I didn't use this tool, I instead used Senate Stock Watcher [0]. But a cursory review [1] of the trades made by senators showed the amounts to be very small (66% of trades were <…
      bko on HN
    • Probably not a very good one, somewhat surprisingly. I haven't run any analyses / haven't looked at this dataset in depth but from past forays into congressional datasets I don't…
      awinder on HN
  • Reporting lag of up to 45 days limits usefulness.

    From 2 comments
    • There is a substantial delay between the time of the actual trades and their filing, so any edge they might have had is long gone by the time you have access to the data.
      finolex1 on HN
    • Unfortunately the senators get 45 days to disclose their trades.
      jchook on HN
  • Uses Yahoo Finance API that may no longer exist.

    From 2 comments
    • It says it uses the "Yahoo Finance API" but it seems no such API is offered by Yahoo anymore. There are other sites that offer access to what they call the "Yahoo Finance API". I…
      TekMol on HN
    • There definitely is still a Yahoo Finance API for large corporate customers. That's where Apple's Stocks app gets its data, for example. I'm not sure about the third party…
      snazz on HN

Requests

  • Add PDF OCR parsing support.

    From 2 comments
    • Seems to add the PDF analyzing feature is not that hard or I'm missing something? Have you tried to incorporate this feature?
      christiansakai on HN
    • If someone could help out and make a PR to do the OCR for PDFs, that'd be awesome! Would love to add it in.
      nsomani on HN
  • Include senators' spouses and family transactions.

    From 2 comments
    • Great effort, though these kind of tools are useless unless you can include senators’ spouses and family </sarcasm>
      zeeone on HN
    • You'd get more meaningful results if you checked _their_ statements with the transactions of their _family members_. But that's too creepy for me (which is probably what is being…
      olah_1 on HN
  • Replace Selenium with direct API or HTTP requests.

    From 2 comments
    • Nice! Any particular reason you picked using selenium+chromedriver instead of an http lib (like requests) and beautifulsoup?
      dhruvkar on HN
    • Usually for dynamic pages, it's still working off of some internal API. So when I search for first name starts with "a", it's sending a POST request to…
      dhruvkar on HN

Questions

  • Have you done any analysis on the data?

    From 1 comment
    • Great idea. Have you done any analysis on the data? I’d be curious to see if a passive index to track members of the Congress would beat the S&P. Although it may not account for…
      amykyta on HN
  • What is the lag time on this?

    From 1 comment

Alternatives named

  • Senate Stock Watcher

    From 2 comments
    • Sounds like "Senate Stock Watcher": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834524 https://senatestockwatcher.com/
      JoshuaEddy on HN
    • I didn't use this tool, I instead used Senate Stock Watcher [0]. But a cursory review [1] of the trades made by senators showed the amounts to be very small (66% of trades were <…
      bko on HN
  • Alpha Vantage

    From 1 comment
    • I would move away from the Yahoo Finance API, there's a few data sources that you can use that have free access to their API, see [1] for an example. - [1]…
      k3oni on HN
  • Throw Them All Out by Peter Schweizer

    From 1 comment
    • "Throw Them All Out" by Peter Schweizer documented a lot of this. https://www.amazon.com/Throw-Them-All-Out-Politicians-ebook/dp/B0062N35X8
      wdn on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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