Insights

In interpreting these visualizations, it is clear that success of politicians in the stock market can vary greatly. These trends may be related to some of the factors explored in our visualizations, such as geographic and gender-related effects.

1. In the chloropleth representing the MPR (most profitable representative) of each state, neither regionality nor population or number of representatives impacted their success. For example, California has 52 representatives and a MPR of just over 2 million. Washington, however, has only 10 representatvies but a MPR of over 8 million dollars.

2. Another insight from the MPR chloropleth is that not all states even have a representative with public data on their trading behaviors from the last 3 years. This could be due to the fact that many public politicians want to keep their dealings out of the public eye and use other avenues like trust funds to invest.

3. To compare the two chloropleths, vomume of trading does not always mean success. For example, representatives from Oklahoma traded at very high volumes relative to other states at around 20-25 Million Dollars. Michigan reps invested less than 5 Million dollars. Despite the disparity, Michigan's most profitable representatvie took home over 3 million dollars while Oklahoma's was just short of 2 million.

4. In relation to the same chart, politicians can make a lot more money in investments than they do from their salary. As government employees, our representatives are not paid enormous sums of money. Seeing the data presented, however, some congressmen are clearly not struggling to make ends meet with their success on the public trading platform over the past few years.

5. Looking at the profit and age scatterplot, there are visible differences in the trends of profits for men and women as they get older. Males tend to be rather constant in their returns, whereas the profits experienced by females tend to decrease over time. These numbers could be due to the fact that older female reps did not have the same access to financial education that modern women utilize. Another interesting observation is the amount of outliers, however, as both men and women have won and lost big on the markets.

6. From the bar graph of each representative, it is clear that success is not guaranteed. Multiple politicians have gains up into the multi-millions, but a considerable amount also have catastrophic losses. For instance, Michael Mccaul has over 10 Million dollars in profits in the past three years, yet Josh Gottheimer has over 2 Million in losses. This disparity could be due to education backgrounds, different committee positions and knowledge, etc.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the data and our analysis were relatively similar to our expectations for the project. Regardless of how much information you have, the stock market and its seemingly-random tickers have little to no predictable patterns. Making positive returns is a success and many politicians cashed out big over these past few years. Just follow along with the most profitable politicians on your favorite tickers and, before you know it, you'll be making bills too!