Thanks to sharp instincts, access to top-tier managers and advisors, insider knowledge, or a mix of the three, U.S. politicians have garnered a reputation for being exceptional stock market investors and have seen numerous trading bots spring up around their strategies.
One of the most notable such copying strategies was developed by a popular X user with 400,000 followers, Quiver Quantitative, and their website, Quiver Quant.
Their strategy, dubbed simply the ‘Congress Buys Strategy,’ has been extensively backtested, and it tracks the performance of assets purchased by American politicians and their family members, and is weighted based on the reported size of the purchases.
Thus, due to the historical success of such copy trading strategies and the extensive 2026 volatility in the stock market, Finbold decided to examine how much an investor could have made by copy trading American politicians.
Here’s how much the Congression-tracking trading bot is up in 2026
Historically, utilizing a system such as the ‘Congress Buys Strategy’ would have been a reliable path to outperforming the broader stock market. Indeed, the benchmark S&P 500 index is up 81.28% in the last five years and 17.87% up in the last 12 months.
In contrast, the ‘Congress Buys Strategy’ trading bot achieved returns of 19.91% in the last 52 weeks and a remarkable 159.20% since early 2021, overall boasting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.25%.
With such historic performance, it might come as something of a surprise that the strategy tracking American politicians has, in fact, underperformed against the S&P 500 benchmark index in the year-to-date (YTD) chart.
An investment using a ‘Congress Buys Strategy’ trading bot would have lost 3.79% by press time on February 27 if it were made at the start of 2026 – in other words, a $1,000 investment would have turned into $962.
For comparison, the S&P 500 is, being up 0.73% YTD, effectively flat, and, thus, a similar investment would have returned $7.30 within the same time frame, turning $1,000 into $1,007.
Have U.S. politicians lost their stock market ‘touch’ in 2026?
Still, despite the overall Congressional trading tracker being down, there are multiple members of Congress who have, in recent months, seen their trades explode in value.
Perhaps the biggest winner of early 2026 has been Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose August 2025 investment in Ichor Holdings (NASDAQ: ICHR) returned 230% since being reported and 129% in 2026.
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