I Tried Outsmarting Nancy Pelosi's Investment Strategy

After noticing Palo Alto Networks was down sharply over five days but jumped about 10% intraday, Shaan says the move coincided with a disclosure that Nancy Pelosi bought roughly $1.25M in Palo Alto Networks calls, prompting others to “buy blind.” He frames it as evidence that her disclosed trades can move markets via copycat behavior.

Sam argues it’s “kind of crazy” that top government officials (and their households) can trade individual stocks, and he proposes paying them more while requiring their money be held in a transparent political ETF-type vehicle rather than individual names. Shaan notes she’s allowed to trade too and cites the couple’s Nvidia buy as an example of strong timing.

Shaan recounts that Pelosi and her husband bought 25,000 shares of Nvidia in July 2022 around $165 and notes it later traded around $800, calling it an impressive trade. He also claims her 2023 performance was up 65% versus the S&P 500 up 24%.

Shaan says he bought Google after negative sentiment over Gemini/Bard, describing backlash around “woke” image generation and controversial outputs. His reasoning is that Google still owns major assets (Gmail, YouTube, Search, Chrome, Android, Waymo) and he sees the PR-driven selloff as an overreaction.

Sam says he’s strongly against individual stock trading after seeing people on r/Money lose money with options, and he prefers indexing to avoid the “slippery slope.” Shaan agrees philosophically, but says he maintains a small “fun budget” for trades partly as a way to learn through experience.