unusualwhales are incentivised to talk their own book so it's safe to assume they've cherry picked these examples.
The honest way to see if politicians get an outsized return from this type of trading is to run a backtest, with appropriate hedges where you buy whenever anyone buys and sell whenever anyone sells and hold for a medium amount of time (3-6 weeks seems reasonable). unusualwhales know this so the fact that this sort of analysis is missing is telling. In particular, note how they provide stats for what the trading trends are, but not for the outsized performance.
The charts at the end of the article are a lot less impressive and they don't obviously look better than random.
The honest way to see if politicians get an outsized return from this type of trading is to run a backtest, with appropriate hedges where you buy whenever anyone buys and sell whenever anyone sells and hold for a medium amount of time (3-6 weeks seems reasonable). unusualwhales know this so the fact that this sort of analysis is missing is telling. In particular, note how they provide stats for what the trading trends are, but not for the outsized performance.
The charts at the end of the article are a lot less impressive and they don't obviously look better than random.