Mikie Sherrill isn’t the first politician to face insider trading charges — but it could cost her the New Jersey election

Mikie Sherrill, who was comfortably ahead in the New Jersey governor’s race, is starting to pull ahead Lots of interest in trading its shares Lately, and not in a good way. Her fellow lawmakers should pay attention to whether they also have aspirations for higher office.

The Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey appeared to be a candidate to succeed Phil Murphy as governor of her state, a position that has trended blue in recent years. Yet it is now Neck and neck with Republican Jack CiattarelliA successful businessman before entering politics. Her problem: revelations that she spent time day trading stocks while in office, perhaps — if her critics are right — taking advantage of non-public information to make profitable trades.

Public dissatisfaction with it increased Alleged insider trading It could cost her the November 4 election.

Yes, to hear the pundits tell it, Sherrill’s market-timing acumen — buying and selling stocks armed with non-public information during the Covid pandemic a few years ago — puts her ahead of some of the best informed traders in the business.

Ivan Boesky Attention!

The truth is that Cheryl’s stock trades may look bad, but they are not illegal or unusual. In fact, they are in line with other lawmakers caught up in this rotating scandal, which amounts to allegations that they used their access to non-public information to profit from stock trades.

Based on my reporting, a lot of this information wasn’t even non-public, which is why no one has been jailed for this stuff or even charged despite all the hype. Insider trading is difficult to prove because the information is interchangeable; Warnings about the spread of the Corona virus spread all over the Internet while Congress took a “private” look at the matter.

Burger “thing”?

Which makes this “scandal” seem like nothing to Cheryl, right?

not quite. On the campaign trail, Sherrill was strangely incognito when asked about details of the timing of her trades — especially when markets were panicking over the coronavirus in 2020 — other than noting that she no longer trades stocks after being called out a few years ago.

That’s why I took a deeper dive into this controversy by reviewing the timing of its trades, which were revealed by several publicly available sources such as the website that tracks these things, known as Quiver Quantitative.

I came across something strange: In April 2020, the New Jersey Globe published a story stating that Cheryl and her husband “decided to switch to ETFs last December, and instructed a financial advisor to begin the process during the first week of January, before receiving any coronavirus briefings.”

Strange, because her congressional disclosures show that she bought a lot of stocks in January 2020, the same month that President Trump first downplayed the seriousness of the virus. Unless I’m missing something, it didn’t really start to dump stocks until February 20, 2020, when Trump 1 started warning about the coronavirus and stock markets started to crash.

Big trade

Another oddity; Sherrill wasn’t a fan of stock trading in 2019 and 2020 when she first arrived in Congress. TRUE, She’s not Nancy Pelosi; Sherrill’s trading activity reached a high of about $2.4 million in 2020, dwarfing the former House Speaker’s $39 million in trades last year.

But what I did was nothing. So the question remains: why go there when you have so many other things on your plate?

Cheryl and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are not the fattest cats in government, although their condition is comfortably good. Disclosure forms show it is worth $14 million. They have homes and property.

Hedberg, who is she? He met at the Naval Academy He is a Wall Street banker who earns an estimated $3 million annually. (It was his late filing of stock trades that led to a small disclosure fine being imposed on Sherrill in 2021. Through a rep, he declined to comment.)

Cheryl herself is no slouch. A Navy helicopter pilot, she became an accomplished private attorney at Kirkland & Ellis before serving as an assistant U.S. attorney and then entering Congress.

“Mickey does not own or trade individual stocks, and has gone ‘to great lengths’ in releasing the exact dollar-for-dollar values ​​of her money, while New Jersey residents have no idea what Jack Ciattarelli’s net worth is,” says a spokesperson for Sherrill’s campaign.

Then again, she’s certainly not the worst — or first — lawmaker to be caught trying to explain the oddities involved in stock trading and whether they used the privileges of their office to make money.

However, it offers a cautionary tale; If you get into Congress, try to focus your time on working for the people back home and not being a day trader. Put your money in a simple mutual fund like the one that tracks the S&P 500. It’s up about 168% since 2019, and it won’t cost you an election.