If you sort all the top politicians with a portfolio of above $1 million using their annual gains, who do you expect at the top? Likely Nancy Pelosi, but that’s not the case. A Republican Senator named Ashley Moody has gained 310% in the past year using her portfolio.
Her portfolio and her (lack of) trades make everything stand out from everyone else’s.
Is this a new Nancy Pelosi on the other side of the aisle, or are her gains an artifact of a few lucky trades? Let’s take a look.
How Ashley Moody outperformed
Moody’s last batch of trades was in April of last year as the market was recovering from the tariff crisis. She reported buying Ares Capital (NASDAQ:ARCC | ARCC Price Prediction), Howmet Aerospace (NYSE:HWM), Energy Transfer (NYSE:ET), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), and Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ:SMCI).
Out of all these stocks, HWM is up the most, and it is only up 54% in the past year. Some have even collapsed, with SMCI stock down 41% in the past year.
A month earlier in March, she bought both Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY). NVDA stock is up 28% in the past year, with LLY up 53%. The biggest gains came from AMD, which Moody bought in late February. AMD stock is up 306% in the past year.
Is Moody the next Pelosi?
Moody’s trades and gains are quite different from those of Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi herself does not make the trades attributed to her, and it’s instead her husband who makes these moves. Ashley Moody’s trades are “never approved or initiated” by her and are attributed to her because she was part of an extended family investment partnership managed by an adviser.
Moreover, Moody has been far less successful compared to the Pelosis. One year of outperformance is not enough compared to the sustained outperformance of the Pelosis’ portfolio over decades. These trades are even more hit-or-miss, since she owns several stocks (like SMCI) that are down 40-70% in the past year.
She’s no longer trading
Ashley Moody’s portfolio became awkwardly high-performing right as she presented herself as a reformer on congressional stock trading. She ended up exiting the family investment arrangement last year and wants a trading ban so members cannot even appear to profit from office.
Stock market trades with a politician’s name attached to it will always draw eyeballs, but she’s not going to build a reputation like Nancy Pelosi with one outlier year.
All that said, the public record does not show that she or the investment firm sold all the trades. If you like the moves made by whichever investment firm this is, you can still track her stocks, though this is unlikely to yield you an advantage. When people track Pelosi’s trades, they are following trades handpicked by her husband, who is a seasoned venture capitalist. Malice involved or not, following the Pelosi portfolio has historically put you in good hands.
When it comes to Moody’s portfolio, this is now a stale roster of stocks I wouldn’t mirror.
The three stocks I’d still buy from the portfolio
Moody held solid names like AMD, NVDA, and HWM. I expect these three to continue outperforming in the coming years. AMD and Nvidia are making good use of the AI tailwinds, with AMD in particular still being rather undervalued if you take future AI CPU demand into account. Some analysts say AI CPUs will be needed just as much as AI GPUs are today. AMD could be a multibagger if the buildout reaches this stage without a hiccup.
As for Howmet Aerospace, this company is already seeing significant tailwinds from high military spending. The U.S. is expected to spend well above a trillion on its military, with other NATO members collectively bumping up their spending towards a new target of 5% of their GDPs. A plurality of military spending goes into aerospace.
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