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After three terms in the US House and two unsuccessful campaigns for the US Senate, Colin Allred said he's heard plenty about voters' suspicions that politicians are just trying to make a buck in Washington. "'What about the stock trading in Congress? What about people getting rich in Congress?'" Allred said they ask him regularly. "And I have to say to them, you're absolutely right about that, too. We need to be better." He's challenging Rep. Julie Johnson in the Democratic runoff for a Dallas-area House seat on Tuesday, and he's one of several candidates trying to harness populist anger over congressional stock trading. Allred has denounced Johnson for trades involving companies like Palantir, a data analytics firm with ties to President Donald Trump's administration. Johnson said her trades were handled by a financial manager, and she accused Allred of being "only out for himself". She pointed to financial disclosures that showed Allred's wealth nearly doubling during his own tim
Call him the Trader in Chief. Recent presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and sell orders, many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government. Among the Trump trades in a recent report filed with a federal ethics agency was as much as USD 6 million in Nvidia, whose advanced chips Trump approved for sale to China last year. His portfolio also scooped up stocks of several US military suppliers impacted by the Iran war, including Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. "If he were defence secretary, he would be committing a crime," said Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics adviser in the George W Bush administration and a big critic of congressional trading, too. "Technically he can do this, but it is ...