Congress Needs To Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

“If you take these jobs of responsibility, you have to be willing to give up something.”

Alex Kantrowitz
GEN
Published in
5 min readJan 14, 2022

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Mark Warner has a different background than his colleagues in the Senate, one more common in Silicon Valley than Washington’s halls. Before Virginians elected him U.S. Senator in 2008, and governor six years before that, Warner was a venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He co-founded Nextel, a wireless company now owned by Sprint, and invested in hundreds of startups. Today, he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

When I sat down with Sen. Warner this week for Big Technology Podcast, I wanted to learn why his colleagues talked a big game about regulating Big Tech but had done little so far. They risked losing credibility by persistently calling out tech executives and then sitting on their hands. And given Warner’s background, he was the perfect person to ask.

Our conversation covered familiar territory — techno-optimism, tech illiteracy, and lobbyists — but then turned to stock trading. Members of Congress can trade individual companies’ stocks while professing to check their excesses, a stunning conflict of interest that pits their portfolios’ prospects against the country’s. The practice is commonplace, supported by party leadership, and may influence the legislative process. Warner said it should end.

“Members ought to restrict themselves from playing in the market,” he told me. “If you take these jobs of responsibility, you have to be willing to give up something.”

Warner is part of a broader awakening inside Congress around trading individual stocks, an issue that looms over the federal legislature’s push to regulate Big Tech, and its relationship with big business overall. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, known as the House’s best trader, has long favored members being free to trade. But after years of acceptance, there’s finally a movement inside the building to stop this legalized form of corruption.

Among stock traders, it’s common knowledge that you can’t consistently beat the market if you don’t have an edge. Firms that do it regularly tend to find themselves in hot water for insider trading, like Steven Cohen’s SAC Captial, or on top…

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Alex Kantrowitz
GEN
Writer for

Veteran journalist covering Big Tech and society. Subscribe to my newsletter here: https://bigtechnology.substack.com.