Ro Khanna leads the push to ban congressional stock trading. His household just outtraded Nancy Pelosi.

Ro Khanna represents California's 17th district, the deepest of Silicon Valley. Cupertino sits inside it. So do Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Milpitas, and parts of Fremont. Apple, Intel, Applied Materials, and the NVIDIA headquarters all operate inside his district lines. He was born in Philadelphia in 1976, took economics at the University of Chicago, law at Yale, served under President Obama as Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce, then taught economics at Stanford and law at Santa Clara University. He unseated Mike Honda in the 2016 Democratic primary and has held the seat since.

Inside Congress he holds three assignments that matter for any conversation about trade disclosures. He is the ranking member of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems, the panel that oversees defense AI and semiconductor procurement. He sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. And he is the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, the committee whose work directly shapes U.S. chip export controls. He co-chairs the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and serves as a deputy whip and vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Since 2018 he has cosponsored or led on every major proposal to restrict congressional stock trading. He is a House cosponsor of the Ban Conflicted Trading Act introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi. He has publicly backed the TRUST in Congress Act and the broader scorecard of reform vehicles tracked in our explainer on the 2025-2026 stock-trading-ban bills compared. In December 2023 he released a five-point political-reform plan that put a member-and-spouse trading ban at the top. In October 2025 he introduced the Ban Crypto Corruption Resolution to extend conflict-of-interest rules to crypto, memecoins, and stablecoins. In multiple cable, podcast, and floor appearances he has called the existing system "shameful" and demanded a floor vote.

That record has made him one of the most-quoted reformers on the issue. The contradiction this profile examines is what happens when you place that reform record alongside the trading volume that has flowed through his household over the same period.

Approximately 99% of the Khanna household's disclosed assets are held in the name of his wife, Ritu Khanna. The 2023 annual disclosure puts the family's reportable assets in a range of roughly $36.4M to $101.5M with no disclosed liabilities. Roll Call has named Ro Khanna the fourth-richest member of California's congressional delegation. The wealth originates with his father-in-law Monte Ahuja, the founder of the Cleveland-based automotive parts firm Transtar Industries and chairman of the Ahuja family investment vehicle Mura Holdings. Ritu Khanna's career before marriage was in product marketing at the Italian luxury brand Bulgari in New York after she earned a master's in strategic communications from Columbia.

The trading activity inside that trust is one of the largest in Congress. Aggregate disclosure databases show the household has filed roughly 12,123 trades worth $210 million in disclosed volume over the past three years, spread across 879 distinct issuers. East Bay Insiders, citing public disclosure data in September 2023, put the running total at $263 million across 14,000-plus trades since late 2020, with $103 million across 4,753 trades in the prior twelve months alone. The San Francisco Standard, in March 2026, reported "over 3,000 trades totalling nearly $50 million" in the previous year.

By volume, that places the Khanna household among the two or three most active portfolios on Capitol Hill, ahead of nearly every other member commonly cited as a heavy trader. We track the rankings in the most active stock traders in Congress.

The legal structure is the same household-level arrangement that defines every modern conflict-of-interest case under the STOCK Act. The trust is not a qualified blind trust under congressional rules. It is a family trust set up by Ritu's family. Ro Khanna does not have to put his name on a trade for it to appear in his disclosures, because the law requires him to disclose trades by his spouse and dependent children. He maintains, repeatedly and on the record, that he has no input into the trades. We treat the broader question of whether that arrangement satisfies the spirit of disclosure law in our editorial on the spouse loophole at the centre of every 2025-2026 ban bill.

In February 2024 Ritu Khanna's trust bought shares of NVIDIA. The position appreciated approximately 143% by the time the disclosed gain was filed, which the PTR recorded in the $100,000 to $250,000 bracket. NOTUS reported the trust then purchased NVIDIA on ten additional occasions through 2025, including a May 2025 buy in the $15,000 to $50,000 bracket that gained over 50% by the time NOTUS published.

The NVIDIA headquarters is in Santa Clara, inside Khanna's congressional district. He is the ranking Democrat on Armed Services CITI, the subcommittee with direct oversight of defense AI procurement. He is the ranking member of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the committee whose work shapes the export-control regime for advanced semiconductor sales to China. He has personally weighed in on which NVIDIA chips should and should not be sold to China and the UAE, telling reporters: "We shouldn't sell [China] our most advanced chip, but we should sell them those chips that are less powerful than our most advanced." NVIDIA's stock price is directly responsive to those export-control rulings.

On April 8, 2026, Anthony Pompliano of ProCap Insights posted an analysis on X claiming the Khanna household produced a 112.1% excess return over the S&P 500 between January 2024 and April 2026, eclipsing Pelosi's 38.5% outperformance over the same window. His caption: "Nancy Pelosi take a seat. There is a new king in town when it comes to Congress members being abnormally good traders." Elon Musk replied "Wow." The numbers were picked up by Newsweek, Benzinga, and the rest of the financial press the next week.

A 2022 New York Times investigation, before NVIDIA's run, had already identified Khanna as the member of Congress with the most household trades overlapping the work of committees on which he served: 149 potential conflicts of interest across 897 reported trades, the highest count in their study. The Times specifically named AbbVie, Lockheed Martin, and Johnson & Johnson among the conflicted issuers. We cover the structural reasons that committee-aligned trading produces outperformance in our explainer on committee conflicts, and the academic evidence specifically on AI and semiconductor names in Congress and AI Stocks.

The Ban Conflicted Trading Act is the House vehicle Khanna has cosponsored since 2020. It prohibits members of Congress from trading individual stocks. It does not extend that prohibition to spouses. Newsweek asked Khanna in October 2021 whether he is in compliance with the bill he supports. His office answered yes, because the trades are made by his wife's trust and not by him. That single answer is the entire spouse loophole, captured in a quote by one of its loudest opponents.

The pattern repeated in his own December 2024 House resolution, H. Res. 938. The reform text declared that members of Congress should not be able to hold or trade stocks. It did not extend the prohibition to spouses or dependent children. When Donald Shaw at Sludge ran the story on December 30, 2024, Khanna responded that the omission was unintentional and would be fixed in the next Congress, with the TRUST in Congress Act framed as the actual vehicle.

Two patterns emerge. First, the bills Khanna supports overwhelmingly leave spouse holdings legal. Second, when the spouse provision is included in a stronger vehicle like the TRUST in Congress Act or the PELOSI Act, his own household's trust falls inside the scope and would have to be restructured. The TRUST in Congress Act requires the assets be placed in a qualified blind trust during the member's term. A family trust managed by a spouse with her own financial advisor is not a qualified blind trust under congressional rules.

We map every reform proposal currently moving through Congress against five tests, including spouse coverage and qualified-blind-trust enforcement, in our scorecard at the congressional stock trading ban bills compared. Of the seven active vehicles, only two close every spouse-related path.

The headline numbers in this profile come from a small set of analyses. The 112.1% excess-return-over-S&P-500 figure originates with ProCap Insights, an analytics outfit run by Anthony Pompliano, covering January 2024 through April 2026. The 143% NVIDIA return is implied from Ritu Khanna's disclosed gain bracket. The 12,123 trades / $210M volume figure comes from public disclosure data aggregators that track filings on the House Clerk's site. The 149-conflict figure is from a 2022 New York Times investigation that audited five years of disclosures.

Three caveats apply to all of these.

First, every number is an estimate. Disclosed amount ranges span an order of magnitude. A trade reported in the $1,000,001 to $5,000,000 bracket could be anywhere in that 400% spread. Every tracker, including the ones with the most polished dashboards, is working from disclosure ranges, not confirmed transaction values. Our explainer at how to read a congressional disclosure walks through every field on a PTR and what it does and does not reveal.

Second, the academic consensus on copying congressional trades is mixed. Peer-reviewed studies have found periods of outperformance in committee-aligned trading and periods of zero alpha across Congress as a whole. We summarise four major academic papers in do members of Congress beat the market. Individual outperforming years are easy to find. Reliable systematic alpha from raw disclosure data is harder.

Third, the 45-day disclosure window is the structural problem with the entire system. By the time a trade is publicly disclosed, the catalyst has often already played out. NVIDIA's February 2024 trade was disclosed weeks later. The price had moved. This is the same lag that affects every name in our editorial coverage, including Pelosi and Tuberville. The window is the point of the disclosure system, and no tracker can close it. The structural reasons it persists are in the STOCK Act loopholes.

Khanna has spent 2025 and the first half of 2026 on a town-hall tour through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and Republican-held districts. He has stated on C-SPAN that he will "consider" a 2028 presidential run after the November 2026 midterms. He carries the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in November 2025, as a bipartisan-credentials piece. He led the discharge petition with Rep. Thomas Massie that forced the House vote, which passed 427 to 1.

A serious presidential candidacy in 2028 will require Khanna to answer the trading question more completely than he has so far. A primary opponent has already entered his House race on exactly that ground. The Democratic primary electorate has shown, repeatedly, that it cares about the issue. Eighty-six percent of the U.S. public supports a congressional stock trading ban, according to repeated polling. Khanna's challenge will be reconciling the years of reform rhetoric with the trust that has produced one of the most aggressive trading records in the modern Congress, while his own bills have left spouse holdings legal.

For the broader story on why no ban has yet passed despite that level of public support, see the congressional stock trading ban explained. For the most documented cases of congressional trading where intent has been alleged, see insider trading in Congress, the documented examples.