Sen. Richard Burr’s sale of up to $1.7 million in stock shortly before the recent market crash was one of the lawmaker’s only market-beating trades since record-keeping began eight years ago, according to a new study.
The new analysis, presented by researchers at Dartmouth University, shows just how unusual the North Carolina senator’s transactions were. On a single day, Feb. 13 of this year, Burr unloaded a significant portion of his net worth — a departure from his typically low-volume trading history.
The Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman was generally a poor stock-picker, said Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth who worked on this analysis along with two of his students. In fact, most U.S. senators over the course of the past eight years have only found middling success in the stock market, their study found.
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