Markets & the presidency
Individual stock & bond trades while in office, by president
Individual securities trades reported on presidential financial disclosures during time in office. For three decades the number was zero by design: Clinton and Bush used blind trusts, Obama held only Treasuries and an index fund, Trump's first term held funds in a bank-trusteed account, and Biden held no securities at all. The June 2026 disclosure reported more than 14,000 individual stock and bond trades in a single calendar year.
What the 927-page disclosure shows
| Item | Figure | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Securities transactions, calendar 2025 | 21,285 | 15,524 purchases + 5,761 sales across 8 accounts; ~85 trades per market day |
| Individual stock and bond trades within that | 14,500+ | ~8,600 resolved to 925 distinct stock tickers; ~6,500 were corporate and municipal bonds |
| Disclosed value range | $600M–$1.86B | Reported in brackets; roughly half of all trades sat in the smallest band ($1,001–$15,000) |
| Largest single trades | $5–25M each | Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia purchases on Aug 18, 2025 |
| Trades reported after year one | 5,931 | Through Jun 29, 2026, on 18 periodic reports (GovGreed count); 3,555 in Q1 alone (up to ~$500M) |
| Corporate-bond purchases since inauguration | >$180M | Incl. Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Meta, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Boeing, and Intel, bought after the government took a ~10% Intel stake |
| Disclosure length, for scale | 927 pages | Obama's ran ~8 pages; Biden's ~11; VP Vance's same-day filing was 17 |
The timing questions on record
The disclosure surfaced trades whose timing drew congressional scrutiny, none adjudicated. The filing shows 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia; the next morning the president posted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” and announced the tariff pause hours later, sending the S&P up 9.5%. Nearly all 2025 stock trades were disclosed over a year late, without the periodic transaction reports the STOCK Act requires, at a penalty of roughly $200 in late fees. Reporting has since documented at least 44 stock purchases within a week before complimentary presidential posts about the companies bought, and an August 2026 letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Robert Garcia flags 30 trades adjacent to policy actions, including Nvidia and AMD purchases a week before chip-export rules were loosened and an Axon purchase before a ~$220M immigration-enforcement contract. Written answers to that letter were due August 28, 2026.
The trust, precisely
The trades run through the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust: the president is the settlor and sole beneficiary, his son Donald Jr. is sole trustee, and, being revocable, its assets can be reclaimed at any time. A qualified blind trust requires an independent institutional trustee and a beneficiary who does not know the holdings; here the president personally signs the disclosure certifying the holdings each year. The three explanations offered on the record, family-managed, independently managed by unnamed third parties, and “a blind trust,” do not describe the same arrangement.
Fairness column
None of this is illegal: the criminal conflict-of-interest statute expressly exempts the president, the STOCK Act requires disclosure but prohibits nothing, and blind trusts are a norm, never a law. The Trump Organization says the accounts are fully discretionary, managed by third-party institutions through automated processes with no advance notice of trades, and modern direct-indexing portfolios do generate enormous transaction counts as routine practice. Whether the president directs any individual trade is contested and unresolved. Symmetry note: the handful of trustee-managed fund transactions in Trump's first term and Biden's term are excluded here, and the same rule excludes fund line items from the second-term count.
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Summary
Like the foreign-money chart, this metric has a baseline of zero by construction: for over thirty years, presidents of both parties arranged their finances so that no individual trade could intersect a presidential decision, by blinding themselves, by holding only the market, or by holding nothing. The second Trump term replaced that arrangement with an active nine-figure portfolio of individual stocks and bonds, traded daily, in companies whose regulators, contracts, and tariffs the owner controls. The volume itself may be ordinary wealth management; what the zero-baseline comparison measures is that no other modern president permitted the question to exist.