Nancy Pelosi dumps $1M in this stock 2 months before huge lawsuit

As the stock trades by Nancy Pelosi continue to attract attention, the former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and a prime stock trader in the U.S. Congress has offloaded $1 million in the shares of a company currently facing a lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Specifically, people familiar with the matter said that the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division is planning to file a lawsuit in federal court against Visa (NYSE: V), accusing the payments network operator of anticompetitive practices, according to a report on September 24.

As a result, the Visa stock price has dipped as much as 2.12% in after-hours trading and is currently standing at $288.15, recording a decline of 0.60% across the week, reducing to 5.28% its gains from the past month and its year-to-date (YTD) growth to 9.08%, according to the data on September 24.

Nancy Pelosi’s Visa stock sell-off

Interestingly, the news of the antitrust lawsuit against Visa arrives just over two months after Pelosi updated her stock portfolio, reporting the sale of 2,000 Visa shares worth up to $1 million, considering she had been holding them since 2011, when their price was below $30.

Although the timing of the former House Speaker’s sale seems impeccable, suggesting she might have had some insider information that bad news was brewing for Visa, it is possible that she was simply taking the opportunity to profit on her well-placed V stock bet as the price eventually had to go down.

However, considering her other well-timed sales and purchases, it is no surprise that many stock traders and investors wonder if she is using her position and political connections to attain exclusive information or even push forward policies that could affect the price of stocks in relevant industries.

Regardless, following Representative Pelosi’s Visa trades via Finbold’s Congressional trading radar and using the signal to sell V stocks when she did would help a trader avoid the significant price declines incurred by the recent DOJ lawsuit reports and sell at a more significant profit.

That said, making a definite Visa stock forecast is impossible, so doing one’s own research, including keeping up with any relevant Visa news and weighting all the included risks is critical when investing a significant amount of money.