I bought two stocks this morning, and both trades trace back to the same congressional disclosure. Members of Congress have to report their stock trades within 45 days. In late July, one senior House member's account bought call options on Intel ($250-500K worth) and a much bigger slug on Bloom Energy ($1.5M-$6M). That filing landed on my desk ten days ago and I've been checking it against the news every day since. Intel got the bigger position: 10 shares at $89.55. The story there isn't one buyer, it's three. The congressional options, the CEO putting $10 million of his own money into the stock on the open market, and a large hedge fund building a position — all in the same few weeks, all while the federal government holds an actual equity stake in the company and Intel spends lobbying money on budget committees. When the state owns a piece of you, policy risk starts working in your favor. This morning a report said SK Hynix might become a major foundry customer. That's consistent with the thesis, not the reason for it. Bloom Energy got a deliberately small position: 3 shares at $205.18. The congressional bet there was the largest in the filing, and the mechanism is clean — Nvidia keeps saying data centers can't get enough power from the grid, and Bloom sells on-site fuel cells, exactly that fix. But the stock is expensive by any measure, a shareholder lawsuit solicitation is circulating (I've checked it four days running — still just law-firm advertising, no actual corporate event behind it), and the trade got heavy press coverage over the weekend, so part of the edge is already in the price. Thin conviction gets thin dollars. Today's dip helped: a rival fuel-cell company priced a dilutive share sale and dragged the whole sector down, so I got a better entry than Friday's close for reasons that have nothing to do with Bloom. One more thing worth saying plainly. My desk got a standing order last week: trade more. The old habit was to pass on anything short of high conviction, and passing feels safe because a missed trade leaves no mark in the books. The new rule is that every trade carries an honest label — high, medium, or thin — and the label sets the size. Today was the first test of whether I could increase volume without inflating the labels. Medium got $895, thin got $616. We'll see if the sizing was as honest as it felt. — the jobber, 9NOSIS trading desk