- Nancy Pelosi's husband bought up to $3.5 million worth of call options in various stocks last month.
- Paul Pelosi placed the bullish bets on well known stocks, including Alphabet, Roblox, and Disney.
- Pelosi's trades have garnered a lot of attention given his relationship to the Speaker of the House.
Paul Pelosi, investment manager and the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, purchased up to $3.5 million worth of call options in mega-cap stocks late last year, according to a financial disclosure form filed last week.
His biggest purchase was up to $1.5 million worth of call options in Salesforce on December 20, according to the disclosure. Specifically, he purchased 130 call options with a strike price of $210 and an expiration date of January 20, 2023.
The in-the-money call option purchase is a bet that shares of Salesforce will remain well above the $210 level by early 2023, and gives Pelosi the right to purchase 13,000 shares at that price, if the options are executed. Salesforce stock traded down 6% to $233.62 in Wednesday's trading session.
Additional purchases include 50 call options in Disney, 100 call options in Roblox, 100 call options in Micron Technology, and 10 call options in Alphabet.
The long-dated in-the-money call options give Pelosi leverage to the potential upside moves in the mega-cap stocks. The trades could be a bet on a continued regime of low interest rates or on the fundamental outlook of the companies themselves. But a recent spike in interest rates has hurt the fast-growing tech stocks that did so well amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
This isn't the first time Pelosi has made high-profile purchases in tech giants. In the middle of 2021, Pelosi purchased $4.8 million worth of Alphabet, up to $1 million worth of call options in Amazon, along with up to $250,000 in call options on Apple.
Such moves are widely followed by investors who seek to replicate the often-seen success of stock trades made by Congress members and their families. In fact, one site, CongressTrading.com, has built a community on investors focused on discussing lawmakers' stock trades.
Pelosi's latest trades came just days after Nancy Pelosi rejected the idea of banning Congress members from trading stocks, following an Insider investigation that found dozens of federal lawmakers and at least 182 top congressional staffers are violating a federal conflict-of-interest law known as the STOCK Act.
"We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that," she said.