Editor’s Note: Our friend Karim Rahemtulla, one of the co-founders of Monument Traders Alliance, is a true market veteran.
He has more than 30 years of experience in options trading and international markets, and he is the author of the bestselling book Where in the World Should I Invest?
Below, he explains why investing based on policy decisions can be a grave mistake.
He also published a helpful new training a few days ago titled “80% of Traders Lose – Here’s How You Flip the Odds.”
I learned a ton from it – check it out here.
– James Ogletree, Senior Managing Editor
Three months ago the Strait of Hormuz was open.
A political and military escalation changed that. Oil surged toward and above $100 a barrel, gas prices jumped sharply at the pump, and Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain.
Billions in planned AI infrastructure across the Gulf, including projects that were announced with great fanfare just months earlier, are now in question.
None of that was in any investor’s bingo card at the start of the year.
Here is the uncomfortable truth beneath it all. Policy has no memory. And the people making it are profiting from its inconsistency while you absorb the consequences.
Think about every investment thesis that made sense four years ago. Electric vehicles were the future, coal was dead, natural gas was transitional, and AI data centers in the Gulf were the next decade of infrastructure spending.
Every one of those narratives has been reversed by political decisions, some by the same politicians who were promoting them.
You cannot build a durable portfolio around policy because policy is not built around you.
The trading data makes that plain.
In 2025, members of Congress disclosed 13,324 stock trades totaling $635 million. Of 311 portfolios analyzed, roughly 32% outperformed the S&P 500.
Among active traders, 29 members beat the benchmark, split almost evenly between 15 Democrats and 14 Republicans.
Congressional leaders earn higher returns on companies that contribute to their campaigns, outperforming rank-and-file members by up to 47% per year on those specific holdings.
Their party members vote for bills that help the stocks their leaders hold. Peer-reviewed research documents this.
Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio has grown 16,930% since 1987 while the Dow returned 2,300%. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, led all of Congress in 2025 with a +78.8% rating. Rick Scott, Republican senator from Florida, came in at +54.8%.
This is not a partisan problem. It is a structural one.
The people who are reversing your investment theses are the same ones profiting from the reversal.
The Iran conflict is the clearest example I have seen in years.
The Strait was open. Investments were made based on that reality, and then it was closed. The investors who positioned around Gulf AI buildout, LNG exports, and Middle East energy infrastructure are dealing with the consequences of a decision made in Washington and Tel Aviv, not in any boardroom or research report.
You could not have seen it coming by reading a balance sheet.
So what do you do?
You stop investing around what politicians say and start investing around what cannot easily be reversed: dominant market positions, pricing power, business models that work whether the regulatory environment stays flat or gets worse.
You size positions to limit exposure to any single policy narrative and stop treating government guidance as a durable tailwind.
I have applied that filter to every investment I have made over the past 30 years.
If a company’s thesis depends on a favorable policy outcome, I walk away. That discipline has saved me more times than any trade idea.
Not just from market volatility, but from the decisions of people who write policy with one hand and trade on it with the other.
Invest around what is real, not around what is promised.