Investors need markets where nobody trades on information the government has not released. 0.50

Value: Free enterprise · Used on: Public office should not be usable for private gain.

Measured by	Abnormal returns on officials' trades placed before government announcements
Belief Y	Public office should not be usable for private gain.	Truth 0.50

Validity ArgumentsInterest scoring →

Reasons to agree that this need is real and legitimate

#	Reason (pattern)	Truth	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Recognized in lawInsider trading law protects exactly this interest for every other participant in the market.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00
2	Asks no transfer from othersA market in which nobody trades on nonpublic government information costs nobody anything they were entitled to.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00
3	Widely heldEveryone with a retirement account is on the other side of these trades.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00

Reasons to disagree

#	Reason (pattern)	Truth	Conf	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Already metThe STOCK Act made insider trading law explicitly applicable to Congress in 2012, so the legal interest is already recognized.	0.50	0.00	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00
2	Held by fewThe measurable harm to any individual investor is close to zero, which is why nobody sues.	0.50	0.00	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00

Total agree 0.00 · total disagree 0.00 · interest score 0.50

An interest is a need, stated so it can be argued: "[who] need [what]". Reasons here are about whether the need is real and legitimate, never about whether the belief is true and never about how many people hold it.

Check table

1	If the belief is true, the measure should show	Fall to zero
2	If the belief is false, the measure should show	Persist at their current level
3	Latest reading (with source)	Mixed: 85 basis points a month for senators over 1993 to 1998 (Ziobrowski 2004); no advantage found over 2012 to 2020 (Belmont 2022); 3 to 5 percent before legislative events over 2014 to 2021 (Zhou 2025)
4	Basic test: do the two sides expect different readings?	Yes: the readings differ, so this interest is at stake in the belief.
5	Computed validity	0.50 from 3 reason(s) to agree and 2 to disagree
6	Bottom line, typed by the author after the tables above	Valid and recognized; the disputed part is how much is actually at stake.

The five steps, answered from the pages above. Only the one-sentence bridge and the bottom line are typed.

DefinitionsThe full explanation →

Validity: this page's truth score. It says how legitimate the need is in general, on its own. How much it drives a position is a different number (the Driver page), and how negotiable it is belongs on the feasibility track. Power never weights validity.
Measured by (row 4) is what a reading of this interest looks like; the readings in the check table say what each side expects to see if the belief is true or false. Content, not scores.

Where This Page Is Used

Top 5 of 14 rows shown. Show all

Page	Table	As	Its truth
Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	costs and benefits	who gains or pays	0.50
Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Members regularly trade in the industries their own committees oversee, which puts a private financial stake on both sides of decisions they control” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Trading on a closed briefing is almost impossible to prosecute, so the only rule that can actually be enforced is one that does not require proving what an official knew” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to disagree: “The best-identified studies of actual returns find congressional portfolios underperform the market, which is hard to square with a systematic insider advantage” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This supporting finding: “Senators' stock purchases beat the market by about 85 basis points a month, roughly 10 percent a year, over 1993 to 1998” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This supporting finding: “Trades placed before legislative events earned abnormal returns of about 3 to 5 percent over 2014 to 2021” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This supporting finding: “78 members of the 117th Congress violated the STOCK Act's disclosure deadlines” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This weakening finding: “Congressional portfolios underperformed market benchmarks by roughly 2 to 3 percent a year over 2004 to 2008” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This weakening finding: “No evidence that members of Congress outperformed the market over 2012 to 2020, the period after the STOCK Act” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This prediction if the belief is false: “Post-reform studies continue to find no abnormal returns, so there is no trading advantage for a ban to remove” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This work: “Ziobrowski, Cheng, Boyd and Ziobrowski, Abnormal Returns from the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. Senate (2004)” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This work: “Eggers and Hainmueller, Capitol Losses: The Mediocre Performance of Congressional Stock Portfolios (2013)” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50

Every page that reads this one. One claim, one home, every use visible.

Scoring EngineTruth scores →

Quantity	Value	How
Reasons to agree, total	0.00	sum of the agree side
Reasons to disagree, total	0.00	sum of the disagree side
Interest score	0.50	(agree + weight x starting point) / (agree + disagree + weight), starting point 0.50, weight 1.00
ReasonRank	0.0002	how much of the site depends on this page: rank 940 of 2173. The share of a walk that starts at the 162 beliefs and steps to the pages they read, with a 0.85 chance of stepping on each time
Work value	0.0002	ReasonRank x (1 - confidence): how much settling this page would be worth to everything above it
Completeness	yes	at least one scored reason on each side (an importance page: at least one interest; an interest page: both readings filled)

Cite this page Investors need markets where nobody trades on information the government has not released. Idea Stock Exchange, interest page investors-need-markets-where, truth 0.50, confidence 30%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.

Every number on this page as data: investors-need-markets-where.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.

Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.