Chris Josephs, who runs the X account "Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker," explained to Tucker Carlson on a recent YouTube broadcast that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) began to attract attention for her highly successful stock trading when she bought Tesla stock LEAPS in 2020.

"So Pelosi gets a lot of headlines for obvious reasons. One, millions, [she] massively outweighs what the other politicians are trading. I’m talking like she’s trading 50 million to 60 million while everyone else is trading smaller amounts,” Josephs said.

He added, “When she got married to Paul, they were worth around $20 million. Their net worth now is around $260 million. So you’re 10 X-ing that. How? She’s been a career-long politician making 175K. Her husband’s very, very successful in stocks, particularly tech stocks. It all started with her in 2020 when she bought Tesla.”

Josephs said that was the point when he started looking at the former Speaker of the House's stock trading and looking at her previous trades. He pointed out that it was during COVID when people were focused more on trading because they couldn't go out and do other things.

LEAPS

“They’re on social media, and they’re trading stocks. So now everyone’s acutely watching these things and paying attention. At the end of 2020, right after Biden got elected, she went and bought up to $5 million of Tesla calls,” Josephs said. “She’s not just buying stock. Well, her husband’s not just buying, she’s buying these things called LEAPS.”

LEAPS are Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities, and they allow people to buy stock options and wait for a particular price to exercise the option.

“So instead of you needing $5 million to buy X amount of quote unquote risk in a stock for it to go up, you can actually take that $5 million and buy a LEAP. It gives you a broader Delta so that you can make more money, essentially higher risk, high reward,” Josephs said.

He chronicled several examples of the Pelosis buying stocks right before a bill was passed that caused them to go up in price rapidly.

This happened with EV subsidies in the ill-named "Build Back Better" bill, and it happened with NVIDIA several times, most recently when she sold $30 million of the stock last month right before it went down.

"Wait a second"

The Tesla trade was the one that made the public begin to ask questions about politicians trading stocks, however, he said.

“That was the first trade that I think re-triggered everyone’s mind until like, ‘Wait a second, this may not be the sketchiest trade in the world because those things were still public, but how are they allowed to necessarily do that?’ How is Pelosi, the third most powerful person in America … how are we allowing that?” Josephs asked. “I think like the culmination of those different intersections is why this started getting big and why people started paying attention specifically to Pelosi.”

Josephs acknowledged that she wasn't necessarily using insider knowledge to make the trades: "It’s not like she’s actually buying things that the public wouldn’t necessarily know about," he said.

But it comes across as less than honest when she and her husband are able to pick exactly the right stocks at exactly the right times over and over again.

Pelosi has said she thinks it's perfectly fine for politicians with a lot more insider knowledge than most people to trade stocks, and why wouldn't she think so when it has made her tens of millions of dollars over just a few short years?