Trade the Congressional Effect: How To Profit from Congress's Impact on the Stock Market

How to Leverage This Glut of Information

This chapter has tried to suggest a lengthy list of Washington, D.C.–related resources. I use them mostly by scanning them just to see if there is any new trending information of political gossip. The mathematically oriented ones will give you clues as to which people will prevail. For example, although the presidential race may turn out to be quite close and not usefully predictable, it may well be that several weeks ahead of the election in November 2012 you can get a feel for whether there will be a split Congress or a unified Congress. You can estimate this based on polling. You can further handicap the political horse races of the elections by tracking the audience figures for different web sites and media outlets. In the fall of 2004, Fox News beat out its news rivals including ABC, NBC, and CBS by two million viewers for coverage of the Republican convention, and that represented a new level of hard-core support for the president in hindsight. At the time, I thought that it boded well for President Bush's reelection chances.

Between trends in polling, audience ratings, sites like intrade.com, and donation tracking, it may be possible to handicap the political outcome in Washington, D.C., better than the average market participant. Site traffic is also something to watch, as are digital indicia of loyalty. For example, Quantcast.com tracks traffic to the sites mentioned earlier, and trends in that traffic are similar in informational ...