Nancy Pelosi's stock trades — and the five members replacing her.

How the trades actually work

Nancy Pelosi has stated repeatedly that she does not personally trade individual stocks. The trades that appear under her name on the House Clerk Financial Disclosures portal are made by her husband Paul Pelosi, a Georgetown-trained venture investor who runs Financial Leasing Services Inc. (FLS), a firm based in San Francisco. Under the STOCK Act, trades by a member's spouse are disclosed under the member's name because the member is the covered federal official.

This is the source of the so-called "spousal loophole." Whether Nancy Pelosi directs Paul Pelosi's trading is unprovable absent a recorded conversation. The legal standard for insider trading on the basis of legislative information would require the prosecutor to establish that Paul Pelosi made trades because of material non-public information passed to him by his wife. There is no public evidence that this has happened, and no court or DOJ proceeding has ever made the finding. There is, however, a striking pattern of trades that align with sectors and tickers downstream of her committee work and floor scheduling.

The most cited recent example: $500K of Google call options purchased on Inauguration Day 2026, before the new administration's pro-AI executive orders pushed GOOGL substantially higher in the following weeks. The trade was disclosed within the 45-day window via PTR. Public response, per @PelosiTracker_ and Wall Street Bets, was the same as always: half memes, half resignation, and a small amount of cynical respect.

What the backtest actually shows

Quiver Quantitative's portfolio replication study — the most-cited Pelosi backtest — applies a buy-and-hold mirror strategy to every disclosed Pelosi trade from 2014 onward. The result, through 2024:

• +177% outperformance vs. the S&P 500. Approximately 5.8x the index's total return over the same window.
• Higher win rate on individual stock picks than 90%+ of professional fund managers in the same period.
• Performance concentrated in large-cap technology — NVDA, GOOGL, AAPL, MSFT, META, AMZN, AVGO, CRWD — with episodic options activity.

The numbers have been replicated by multiple outlets (Yahoo Finance has cited a 16,930% lifetime return figure; InsiderFinance and Stockcircle publish broadly comparable composites). The backtests differ in start date and methodology, but the direction and order of magnitude are consistent. Paul Pelosi has been a serious investor since the 1980s; his returns are not random.

The defensible caveat for any "copy Pelosi" thesis: by the time a trade is disclosed (up to 45 days after execution), the price has typically already moved 5-25%. The disclosure is the late confirmation of a thesis, not the signal. More on this in the tracking guide →

Pelosi's most-cited individual trades

The trades below are pulled from public House Clerk Periodic Transaction Reports. Dollar amounts are reported as ranges per STOCK Act rules; we use the midpoint where appropriate. Not financial advice.

Pelosi's full disclosed history across 14 years and 331 individual trades is at /politician.html?id=P000197. Each row in our database links back to the original House Clerk PTR PDF.

The retirement context

On November 6, 2025, CNN reported that Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi will not seek re-election to her California 11th District House seat in the 2026 cycle. The seat is expected to be contested in the Democratic primary by several San Francisco-area candidates including state Senator Scott Wiener.

The retirement matters for stock-trade tracking in three ways:

1. The signal stops. When Pelosi leaves Congress in January 2027, she stops filing STOCK Act disclosures. Paul Pelosi can continue trading at FLS — but his trades will not be public.
2. The Pelosi-tracker product loses its anchor. @PelosiTracker_ (200K+ X followers), Autopilot ($55M AUM, $99/yr), NANC ETF (Subversive Politicians fund) — all of these were largely built on the Pelosi household feed. They will pivot to other signals or shrink.
3. The political ban-bill argument loses its lightning rod. The PELOSI Act, the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, the ETHICS Act, and the TRUST in Congress Act all relied implicitly on Pelosi's household activity as the public face of the problem. Without Pelosi, ban supporters need a new center of gravity. Hawley, Khanna, and Spanberger are reportedly working on a unified replacement bill.

The five members of Congress whose backtests are stronger

The Pelosi trade was always a cohort signal dressed up as a celebrity signal. There are at least five sitting members of Congress whose committee-aligned trading patterns score higher than the household average on our scoring model. Backtests are based on three years of disclosed trades (2023–2025) cross-referenced to committee jurisdiction, sector momentum, and bill markup calendars. Not financial advice.

The composite "post-Pelosi" copy strategy: weight Khanna heaviest (highest-volume + most consistent); treat McCaul as the Hawkish-policy event-driven signal (his trades cluster around Foreign Affairs activity); use Gottheimer for financials, Foxx for healthcare, Hickenlooper for telecom, Sessions for tech. Don't follow trades after the 45-day window; follow the bill calendar that they trade against.

The honest disclaimer about copy-trading

Copy-trading after a 45-day disclosure delay loses 5–25% of the move on average. That is the single biggest critique of every Pelosi-tracker product. The Quiver +177% backtest assumes a buy-and-hold mirror strategy from the date of disclosure, not the date of the actual trade — which is generous.

The defensible reframe is that the disclosure is late confirmation of a thesis you could have built earlier from the public bill calendar. If you knew Khanna sits on Armed Services, you knew he was likely to buy tech ahead of an HASC markup of the FY26 NDAA — without having to wait for the PTR. The Iran playbook page describes one such case. /conflict-check renders the bill–trade overlap for any rep automatically.

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