How Trump’s ‘unusual’ brokerage account traded around his own market-moving decisions

On Feb. 10, an AI founder named Matt Shumer published a 5,000-word essay arguing that most of the world was sleepwalking into a crisis akin to coronavirus, but only tech people knew what was coming. The essay would be viewed nearly 87 million times and crystallized a fear that would engulf Wall Street by the end of the month: AI wasn’t just a boom story. The technology could hollow out entire industries like software engineering, which had been investors’ golden child. 

The day Shumer published the essay, Wall Street didn’t panic. Instead, the Dow closed at a record. But for one brokerage account, something big was happening indeed.

The account in question is held in the name of President Donald Trump. According to a spokesperson from the Trump Organization, the Trump family’s privately held conglomerate, the accounts are operated by third-party financial institutions, which have “sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.” Trades, the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Fortune, are executed through “automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions,” and neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization play “any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”

Davis Ingle, a spokesperson for the White House, told Fortune that Trump’s assets are in a trust “managed by his children” and “there are no conflicts of interest.”

When asked about the apparent tension with the Trump Organization’s statement that the third-party institutions are the “sole” authority over the trades, Ingle told Fortune to “defer to Trump Org.”

On Feb. 10, in the account’s biggest move of the quarter, it sold $5 million-to-$25 million each of Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta—the AI hyperscalers cast as central to American dominance in the technology. The trade was disclosed in the 113-page periodic transaction report the Office of Government Ethics released on May 14. 

At the same time, the filings show, Trump’s account bought into the “SaaSpocalypse” Shumer’s essay predicted. It purchased ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday and PTC—software names that suffered from sharp drawdowns in the days following Shumer’s essay went viral—most in the $1 million-to-$5 million band (the disclosures don’t show the exact figures of trades, only ranges). And it invested in the picks and shovels of AI: Nvidia, Broadcom and other chip providers; Dell, CDW and Jabil in hardware, distribution and manufacturing; and Synopsys in chip-design software.

The Feb. 10 trade seemed like a bet against the hyperscalers funding a generational bull run, with Goldman Sachs estimating that AI-related investment is driving roughly 40% of the S&P 500’s earnings growth this year. The Trump White House partnered with the four tech companies on data centers and energy; three weeks after the trades, the president would stand with their executives at the White House and tell reporters that the companies “need some PR help” as communities pushed back against the data center boom. The morning before the account sold them, his administration had leaked a planned carveout exempting Google, Amazon and Microsoft from tariffs on the core unit of their business: chips—a policy move that would protect the hyperscalers from one of the biggest cost risks looming over the AI boom. The Dow hit another record that day. 

A first look inside a sitting president’s brokerage account

There’s nothing illegal with a sitting president holding positions within the stock market—plenty of presidents have owned corporate stock, mutual funds, or other securities in office. What’s notable about this filing, however, is that it’s raising eyebrows. “It’s an unusual position for a president to be in,” Richard Painter, a securities law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush, told Fortune.

Trump’s new filing appears to offer the first public look in modern presidential history at an active public-markets portfolio in a sitting president’s name. The periodic transaction report the Office of Government Ethics released on May 14 documents 3,642 individual trades made through the account in the first three months of 2026—between $220 million and $750 million in volume at a pace of roughly 60 trades per day. The filing doesn’t always specify whether a given transaction is a stock, bond, or ETF.

“I’ve gone through every president,” Painter said, “I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.”

Since Lyndon Johnson pioneered the use of a presidential blind trust in 1963, every modern president has either placed their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees, held them in index funds and Treasuries, or, in Jimmy Carter’s case, liquidated all their assets (notoriously, his peanut farm). None have actively traded individual securities while in office. Until recently.

In Trump’s first term, his assets were held in the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which controlled his business empire, and the periodic transaction reports it produced drew little attention. Through the first year of his second term, the account traded almost exclusively in municipal and corporate bonds.

But even before the stock trading began, the arrangement drew immediate backlash from federal ethics officials.

Walter Shaub, then the director of the Office of Government Ethics, called Trump’s original trust arrangement “not even halfway blind” in a January 2017 speech at the Brookings Institution. He resigned in July of that same year after clashing with Trump over the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses. 

Selling America during a war

It is impossible to know the scale of what Trump’s account actually holds—the report only shows trades being actively bought and sold, as opposed to stable holdings. But the largest transactions in the account look like they traded around Trump’s actions.

The filing has only four trades in the $5 million-to-$25 million band—its top tier of value. Every single one is a sale. On Jan. 12, the day Trump announced 25% tariffs on countries buying Iranian oil, the account sold its position in the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF—the largest single sale in the filing. The fund is a broad basket of blue-chip companies, marking a divestment from U.S. equities. The other three sales were the hyperscalers.

During the Iran war, Trump’s brokerage account traded into safe-haven stocks like gold and treasuries, even as he said the war would end soon.

On March 4, the day Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the account bought the iShares U.S. Treasury Bond ETF. The next day, it bought iShares Gold Trust in the $500,000-to-$1 million band, alongside an energy ETF and a Canadian equity ETF in the same band. Then, on March 10—three days after Trump announced Iran had “apologized and surrendered”—the account bought a sweep of international and emerging-markets exposure: Europe, Japan, Canada, Eurozone-hedged, international developed markets, and, in the largest single move of the day, the iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF in the $500,000-to-$1 million band. A week later, on March 17, the day Trump told Ireland’s Taoiseach Iran was “essentially largely over in two or three days,” and the account bought a $1 million-to-$5 million purchase of the Schwab Government Money Fund—cash.

On the morning of Monday, March 23, Trump gave markets their first clear signal of deescalation in the war. In an all-caps Truth Social post, he announced the U.S. and Iran had been having “very good and productive conversations” and that he was extending the deadline for a deal by five days. Wall Street, for the first time since the war began, exhaled. Brent crude plunged nearly 11%. Energy stocks—one of the few reliable winners of the conflict—sold off with oil. The brokerage account in Trump’s name spent the day buying them: Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, along with defense and aerospace names like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics—the companies that stood to profit if the war dragged on.

Painter said this is exactly the kind of trading a president shouldn’t do, because the president has both confidential information about overseas developments and the power to move commodities markets through his own decisions. Even with no one in the family directing the trades, he said, it misses the point. “He has no control over the accounts? That’s beside the point. He certainly has the control over the decision about whether we went to war or not.”

Before Trump named the stock

In some cases, the account was building stakes in companies before Trump named them publicly. The account bought Dell on Feb. 10 in the $1 million-to-$5 million band, then added smaller positions throughout March. It never sold a share. On May 8, Trump told a White House audience to “go out and buy a Dell.” The stock hit an all-time high that week, up nearly 24%.

Intel was the same. The account accumulated shares through March. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social that “Intel stock continues to rise,” and the shares gained 3% after hours. The administration owns 10% of the company.

Eggs, sushi, and crypto

The account paid attention to smaller stories, too. On Jan. 28, during the national egg shortage, it bought Cal-Maine Foods, the country’s largest egg producer; it sold two months later in a band two to five times larger. On Feb. 2, it bought between $1 million and $5 million of Kura Sushi USA, a conveyor-belt sushi chain whose entire stock turns over roughly $14 million in a typical day. It also traded Coinbase, Robinhood, Strategy Inc, and a rotation of gambling and sports-betting names across the quarter.

Painter cautioned that even the 113-page filing is partial. The 278-T captures only trades in the president’s personal account—not those of the LLCs and corporations Trump controls, of which there are dozens. The disclosure rules don’t pierce the corporate level. “You’re looking at a very incomplete disclosure picture,” he said.