Public record · House STOCK Act disclosures
Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio, fully decomposed
Yes, her trades beat the market — we won’t pretend otherwise. But strip the leverage and the tech beta and the “oracle of Congress” becomes something more ordinary: a concentrated bet on big tech during the biggest tech run in history.
The honest scorecard
Her disclosed buys, scored like everyone else’s
We take Nancy Pelosi’s 113 disclosed stock purchases, buy each on the disclosure date (the first day you could), hold twelve months, and score against a benchmark — the same test we ran on all of Congress. Of those, 87 have a full year of clean price history.
Her median buy returns +24% a year outright, beats the S&P by +9.1%, and wins 62% of the time. That’s a real, market-beating record. The question this post answers is where it comes from — and whether any of it is repeatable.
Decomposition 1 · It’s mostly tech beta
Benchmark her against tech, and a quarter of the edge evaporates
Her book is big tech: Apple, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Broadcom, Palo Alto. Against the S&P her edge is +9.1%. Against the Nasdaq-100 — the index that actually holds those names — it falls to +6.8%. About a quarter of the “genius” is simply having been long the Nasdaq through its greatest decade. Ticker by ticker, each bar is the median 12-month result versus the S&P:
It is not a wall of winners. Broadcom and Nvidia carried the record; Disney, Amazon and Salesforce lost to the market outright. Strip the two megacap semis and the “can’t-miss” portfolio looks like an ordinary tech-heavy account — some big hits, some duds, net long the right sector at the right time.
Decomposition 2 · The leverage you can’t see
The headline number is options, not shares
Everything above scores her stock buys. The figures that make headlines are something else: Paul Pelosi buys deep, long-dated call options on big tech after dips. Per public disclosures, the 2024 book returned about +70.9% against the S&P’s +25%, with Nvidia calls up +273% and Palo Alto calls up +93%. Those are leveraged bets on the same names in the chart above — a call turns a +30% stock move into a triple. Our data can’t price her specific options, but the mechanism is no secret: it’s the tech thesis, geared up.
Pelosi didn’t find secret stocks. She was long the right sector, early, and levered — and unlike you, she could size it.
The verdict
The record is real, and measured our conservative way she still lands about +7% over even the tech index — the residual that’s either genuine skill or the one book in Congress that had to top the table. But she is one of the roughly one-in-four members who beat the market, and the thing driving her headline isn’t a stock tip you can copy — it’s leverage and timing on megacap tech. Follow the feed and you get Disney and Salesforce too.
What this is and isn’t
- Options not included. We score her disclosed stock buys. Options figures are from public disclosures and press, cited as context, not recomputed here.
- Survivorship + selection. ~15–18% of tickers delist and drop out; and we examine Pelosi precisely because she’s famous for winning — its own bias.
- Not advice. Analysis of public House filings vs a benchmark — not a recommendation to buy, sell, or copy anything.
