The 113-page disclosure, the type of government document that is typically overlooked in favor of more prominent news, was quietly released on a Thursday afternoon. This one didn’t. By the weekend, it was still being scrolled through by traders, lobbyists, and a good number of ethics attorneys as they attempted to understand what they were seeing. In the first quarter alone, more than 3,700 trades were made by either President Donald Trump or the advisors in charge of his accounts. That’s over forty per day. It’s not the pace of a sitting president, but rather that of a mid-sized hedge fund.
On their own, the numbers are blunt enough. The wide range of transactions, which range from $220 million to $750 million, is a peculiarity of federal disclosure. However, the filing’s names are what have people wondering. Nvidia. Boeing. Palantir and Intel. Martin Lockheed. Grumman, Northrop. Oracle. Companies whose fortunes, in one way or another, sit close to the desk where Trump signs executive orders.
The topic that keeps coming up in discussions is the Nvidia acquisition. On February 10, shares worth between $1 million and $5 million were purchased. Smaller purchases had already raised the position one week prior, on January 6. The administration then authorized the export of Nvidia’s H200 chips to Chinese consumers a few days after that February purchase. The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, is said to be close to Trump and traveled to Beijing last week with the presidential delegation. Nothing about this is against the law. The conflict-of-interest regulations that apply to practically everyone else in the federal government do not apply to presidents. Nevertheless, there’s a feeling that the choreography isn’t quite right.
Boeing uses airplanes in place of chips to tell a similar tale. During the quarter, there were seven transactions, including one on February 10 that was between $1 million and $5 million. Trump told Fox News that the package being announced included 200 Boeing aircraft by the time he arrived in Beijing. After struggling for months, Boeing’s stock now had a reason to move. It appears that investors think the timing was fortunate. Some don’t think so.
The president may not be directly involved in any of this. In a statement, the Trump Organization said that he does not make the decisions and that external organizations handle his holdings through fully discretionary accounts. That’s the official line, and it might be accurate. However, the buying pattern—accumulating Oracle, Workday, and ServiceNow following their February decline—seems almost too sophisticated to ignore. It has been dubbed textbook “buy the dip” trading by analysts. The person in charge of the accounts had a successful quarter.
Previous presidents took a different approach to this. Obama and Biden invested their money in blind trusts or broad index funds rather than individual stocks. Exactly, the convention wasn’t lawful. It had to do with appearances. about making it impossible for anyone to question whether a personal trade and a policy decision had been communicating with one another. Trump’s estimated net worth of $6.5 billion gives him flexibility that most officials lack, and he has never been particularly interested in that convention.
You get the impression that Washington is still figuring out how to approach this as you watch it play out. On Instagram, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been discussing the trades. The revelation is being incorporated into the evening rotations of cable shows. Not much has been said by the Office of Government Ethics. Even less has been said by the companies listed in the filings.
Beyond the monetary amounts, the issue of memory remains. Markets tend to forget things easily. Voters forget things more quickly. There will be a new list, new names, and new timing questions by the next disclosure cycle, which is in three more months. It’s still unclear if any of it simply becomes the rules or modifies them.
