This Democratic Senate candidate says he's made a 60% return from copying the Pelosi family's stock trades
"It's not really a serious thing. I'm not banking on this," Scholten, who's now running for US Senate against Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, told BI in an interview. In a financial disclosure filed on Monday, Scholten said that his investment in the "Pelosi Tracker" was made "partly as a joke."
The tracker is run by Autopilot, an app that allows retail investors to automatically copy stock trades made by politicians and prominent hedge fund managers. The Pelosi Tracker follows trades made by Paul Pelosi, who is married to Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi.
Scholten, who calls himself a "prairie populist," said that he would sell off the stocks if elected and said that he supports banning lawmakers from trading stocks.
"I think it's a disservice to the people," he said. "We gotta clean that up to make sure that people are in it for the right reasons, not just to get rich."
Scholten said that he decided to invest in the tracker after hearing about it via Instagram. He had just earned a $1,000 bonus from a law firm he had recently joined, and he decided to try it out.
"I'd never owned a stock before," Scholten said. He told BI that he had $1617.25 in the account as of Monday.
Though the former speaker does not trade stocks herself, her husband's trades have drawn scrutiny given his proximity to Pelosi, who controlled the House floor schedule during her time as speaker and likely had access to non-public information.
Ian Krager, a spokesman for Pelosi, reaffirmed in a statement to BI that the former speaker doesn't own the stocks and has "no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions." She has said that she supports banning lawmakers from trading stocks.
Autopilot cofounder Chris Joseph told BI on Monday that the app now has more than $400 million in client assets following Pelosi's trades, and said that the point of the tracker itself is to "highlight the hypocrisy" of congressional stock trading.
"We welcome JD and hope this further pushes the movement to get them banned from trading," Josephs said.
Scholten rose to prominence in 2018 when he ran for Congress against Rep. Steve King, a Republican with a long history of controversial comments about race and immigration. He came within three points of defeating King that year.
This year, he's running for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. State Sen. Zach Wahls and Nathan Sage are also running in the Democratic primary.
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