Everyone watches Pelosi. The most prolific trader in Congress sits on the committee that oversees the banks he trades.

Josh Gottheimer represents New Jersey's 5th congressional district, a wealthy, suburban stretch anchored in Bergen County, just across the Hudson from New York City. He has held the seat since January 2017, when he unseated seven-term Republican Scott Garrett. He is a Democrat with a deliberately bipartisan brand, a founder and former co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, and one of the wealthiest members of the House, with a net worth that public estimates place somewhere in the range of $42 million to $50 million.

His resume reads like a tour of the institutions that shape financial and technology policy. He was a speechwriter in the Clinton White House in his early twenties, earned a law degree from Harvard, worked at Ford and the public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller, served as a senior counselor at the Federal Communications Commission from 2010 to 2012, and then spent several years at Microsoft as a General Manager for Corporate Strategy. That last line on the resume matters more than the others for this profile, because the single stock he trades most heavily, by a wide margin, is his former employer.

None of this background is hidden. Gottheimer is open about his wealth and his trading, and he has built a reputation as an effective, well-funded operator who takes credit for bipartisan wins on infrastructure and the CHIPS Act. The question this profile examines is not who he is. It is what it means for the single most active trader in Congress to sit on the two committees with the most direct view into the sectors he trades.

Gottheimer sits on the House Financial Services Committee, where his subcommittees include Capital Markets, Digital Assets and Fintech, and National Security and International Financial Institutions. That committee writes the rules for banks, the SEC, payment networks, and the securities markets themselves. He also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he is the ranking member of the National Security Agency and Cyber Subcommittee and a member of the Defense Intelligence Subcommittee.

This is the detail that sets Gottheimer apart from most of the lawmakers people track. With the Pelosi household, the conflict question is about a spouse trading tech while the member led the House. With Marjorie Taylor Greene, it is about timing around macro events, because she never sat on a committee with jurisdiction over her trades. Gottheimer is the opposite case. His committee assignments line up directly with his trading: he oversees the banks and trades the banks, he is briefed on national security and is the single largest congressional trader of defense-contractor stock. The standard test we apply to any disclosure, does this member oversee the sector they traded, returns yes for Gottheimer on two fronts at once.

To be precise about what that does and does not mean: committee overlap is a conflict of interest, not proof of misconduct. There is no finding, charge, or investigation against him. But the overlap is exactly the structural problem the reform debate is about, and Gottheimer happens to embody it more completely than almost anyone else in Congress.

The scale of Gottheimer's trading is genuinely hard to overstate. MarketBeat's tracker counts more than 3,300 disclosed transactions across roughly 470 companies since he took office in 2017, with total disclosed volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Capitol Trades, which only looks back three years, still logs more than 1,300 trades across more than 300 issuers. Trackers disagree on the exact totals because they count split filings and individual legs differently, but every one of them places him at or near the top of the entire Congress for raw activity.

This is not a recent burst. Axios found he made 891 trades between January 2020 and January 2022, by far the most of any House member in that window. Unusual Whales documented 134 trades in the first quarter of 2021 alone, spread across 19 of 24 market sectors. Year after year he ranks among the five most active traders in the chamber. Quiver Quantitative, which models a portfolio mirroring his disclosures, reports that strategy compounding well ahead of the S&P 500, though as with every congressional return estimate, that figure is reconstructed from disclosure ranges and should be read as an approximation rather than an audited result. We walk through why those reconstructions are unreliable in do members of Congress actually beat the market. On a tighter measure, the specific trades Kapitol.ai curated as worth watching scored against the S&P 500, Gottheimer is one of the strongest performers on our best performing congress stock traders leaderboard.

A word on what he actually trades, because his own defense leans on the framing that it is all diversified and hands-off. The tracker data tells a more specific story: his book is dominated by individual mega-cap names and, crucially, by very large options positions, not just broad index funds. His most-traded tickers are Microsoft, Tesla, Eli Lilly, and Apple, and his heaviest sectors are technology, healthcare, and financials. Most of his individual stock trades fall in the smallest disclosure bracket of $1,000 to $15,000, which is part of why the headline trade count is so high. The options, as the next section shows, are a different order of magnitude. For how to read these brackets and what they hide, see how to read a congressional stock disclosure.

In a single disclosure filed in January 2025, Gottheimer reported close to $40 million in Microsoft options across eight transactions, four purchases and four sales of call options struck between $225 and $240. Each leg was disclosed in a range reaching up to $5 million. It was, by dollar value, one of the largest options disclosures by any member of Congress, and it was not a one-off: he had reported up to $36 million in Microsoft options in 2023 as well.

Two facts sit on either side of that trade. Gottheimer is a former Microsoft executive, the company's General Manager for Corporate Strategy before he ran for Congress. And he sits on the Intelligence Committee, where he receives classified briefings on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, the exact domains where Microsoft is a central government contractor and policy player. Trading short-dated call options on the company at the heart of federal AI policy, as a former insider of that company and a current overseer of that policy, is the cleanest single illustration of why his profile draws scrutiny. Microsoft is also one of the largest recipients of Department of Defense contract dollars, which connects directly to the next section. The broader pattern of congressional trading in the megacap technology names is mapped in congress and big tech trades.

The same year he was trading tens of millions in Microsoft options, Gottheimer earned another distinction. An analysis by the Quincy Institute's Responsible Statecraft found that in 2024 he traded more stock in top Pentagon contractors than any other member of Congress, a conservative reading of his disclosures putting it around $22 million across names like Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, and IBM. He does this while sitting on the Intelligence Committee, where he ranks the National Security Agency and Cyber Subcommittee and serves on Defense Intelligence. The wider pattern of lawmakers trading the defense sector they oversee is the subject of our editorial on congressional defense stock trades.

One trade from early 2025 captures the tangle especially well. On January 31, 2025, Gottheimer's account bought roughly $8,000 of Alibaba, the Chinese technology giant, one day after Alibaba released a major new AI model. This was the same Gottheimer who had spent 2024 as a leading voice for banning TikTok over its Chinese ownership, and who days later cosponsored a bill to keep the Chinese AI app DeepSeek off government devices. Buying a Chinese tech stock while championing restrictions on Chinese tech is the kind of contradiction that, fairly or not, follows a member who trades in everything. As always, there is no allegation of illegality, only a record that is difficult to square.

In November 2024, Gottheimer announced a run for governor of New Jersey, and he ran it like the well-funded operator he is, transferring more than $9 million from his congressional campaign into a supporting super PAC. It did not work. In the Democratic primary on June 10, 2025, he finished fourth with about 11.8 percent of the vote. Mikie Sherrill won the nomination and went on to win the governorship that November.

Here is what makes Gottheimer different from the other recent profiles, and why his page is not a retrospective. Nancy Pelosi is retiring. Tommy Tuberville is leaving the Senate for a governor's race. Marjorie Taylor Greene has already resigned. In each of those cases the disclosure trail is closing. Gottheimer lost his statewide bid but kept his House seat, and he is running for reelection in 2026, expected to be unopposed in his primary. The most prolific trader in Congress is not going anywhere. The filings will keep coming, on the same 45-day delay, from a member who sits on the two committees with the clearest view of the sectors he trades. For the full field of who is trading and how often, see the most active stock traders in Congress.