is a platform that allows users to research and duplicate stock trading strategies by members of Congress and other federal stakeholders. The firm has earned a significant social media following in the last year by putting lawmakers on blast who trade stocks while in office. Quiver has over 1 million followers on TikTok and over 145,000 followers on X. Moreover, Quiver’s research dashboard for monitoring Congress, which is free to users who sign up, is the best we've seen for browsing the personal wealth and investments of members of Congress.
Launched in February 2020 by twin brothers James andChris Kardatzke, the Madison, Wisconsin-based platform grew to over 300,000 users before raising $2 million from Allos Ventures in March 2022. “Hedge funds and other professional investors spend billions a year on alternative data to inform their investment decisions,” said James Kardatzke at the time. “We want to level the playing field by bringing this same information to individual investors.”
We asked Chris Kardatzke why they focused so deeply on stock transaction in the House and Senate. “We first started tracking congressional stock trading after several members of Congress sold off stock before the COVID market crash. I found the data behind this story incredibly compelling, but found that most of the media coverage gave just a shallow view,” Chris K. told Capitol Press.
Retired Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, famously sold $1.65 million in stock on February 13, 2020, just before the coronavirus outbreak shut down the world economy. Despite the SEC eventually finding no fault with Burr or his brother-in-law, the trades were particularly suspect because they included tens of thousands of dollars in stock in the hospitality industry, which was devastated by pandemic closures. The visualization Chris built of Burr’s stock trades made the front page of Reddit —
From there, the Kardatzke brothers kept building out Quiver’s capabilities. “I started by just scraping data on the trades, and putting it up in a searchable database. This let people search for trades by ticker,” said Chris K. “Then, we combined the trade data with stock price data to track how trades performed over time. Eventually, we built and backtested trading strategies on top of the data — allowing people to track portfolios mimicking different politicians.”
Through the Congressional Backtester, Quiver users can duplicate stock trades by individual lawmakers, committees, and even the entire legislature through the Congress Buys Strategy, which tracks the overall performance of all stocks that have been purchased by members of U.S. Congress (or their family).
Stock trading by members of Congress has never been popular. A University of Maryland poll last year found that 88% of Democrats, 87% of Republicans, and 81% of Independents were in favor of banning stock trading by members of Congress.Public disclosure laws mandate that lawmakers disclose their stock trades within 45 days of making them, but that doesn’t stop the public skepticism over the obvious conflicts of interest that arise when lawmakers, who are often privy to incredibly sensitive, market-moving information, trade stocks.
Yet the trading continues, so Quiver Quantitative keeps exposing it. “Our goal is to make sure that everything on our site can be understood by someone with no background in politics or finance,” said Chris K. “We don’t always succeed in that, but we do try.” Their work has not gone unnoticed. Beyond the enormous social media presence they’ve built, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) recently gave Quiver Quantitative a shoutout on the House floor, while across the aisle Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) mentioned them during a recent CPAC speech.
Capitol Press is excited to be using Quiver’s dashboards. While neither Arturo nor I have ever traded stock, we think there might be a niche for a newsletter that doggedly asks lawmakers in the halls of power about their trading portfolios. If you support the idea, be sure to subscribe to our reader-supported newsletter on Congress. We couldn’t keep this going without you.
