President Trump’s investment accounts made 3,642 trades from Jan. 6 to March 30, according to a CBS News analysis of his latest disclosure.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s investment accounts bought and sold between $212 million and $695 million in stocks and other securities during the first three months of the year, according to a CBS News analysis of his latest financial disclosure, an extraordinary level of trading for a sitting president.
The filing shows 3,642 transactions from Jan. 6 through March 30, including 2,346 purchases and 1,296 sales. The wide dollar range reflects how federal disclosure forms report individual transactions in bands rather than exact amounts.
The volume has intensified questions from ethics experts and Democrats about the president’s decision to keep an actively managed portfolio while in office. The Trump Organization said the president, his family and the company do not choose, direct or approve specific investments and have no advance notice of trades.
The disclosure, an OGE Form 278-T signed by Trump on May 8, covers transactions across 1,026 companies and funds. Federal officials, including the president, must report securities transactions worth more than $1,000 within 45 days to the Office of Government Ethics, which publishes the filings.
Purchases accounted for between $126 million and $399 million of the activity, while sales totaled between $86 million and $296 million. The most common transaction size was between $15,001 and $50,000. Four sales — involving Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and a Vanguard exchange-traded fund — fell in the top reported range of $5,000,001 to $25 million.
Technology companies were the most heavily traded sector in the data, followed by financial, consumer, industrial and health care companies. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Oracle and AMD appeared most often, with each showing between 17 and 22 trades.
The disclosure shows notable bursts of activity in February and March. On Feb. 10, the accounts sold large amounts of Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, with each transaction reported in the $5 million-to-$25 million range. In March, buying accelerated sharply: the accounts made 1,565 purchases that month, compared with roughly 400 buys in each of the prior two months. On March 23 alone, the accounts recorded 283 purchases and 17 sales.
CBS News reported that the filing represents the highest volume of trades on Trump’s behalf since he returned to office last year. A January disclosure listed 191 transactions over the final two months of 2025, mostly involving municipal and corporate bonds, while another filing signed May 8 listed 69 additional transactions, most of them apparently bonds.
Some trades have drawn attention because they occurred before administration actions or public comments involving the same companies. Trump’s financial managers bought between $500,001 and $1 million of Nvidia stock on Jan. 6, the first of 15 Nvidia transactions during the period; the next week, the administration relaxed export controls affecting Nvidia’s advanced AI chips. The accounts also bought Palantir shares in March before Trump praised the defense contractor in an April 7 Truth Social post, and they purchased as much as $730,000 in Eli Lilly stock during the quarter.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has pointed to the Nvidia trades and other transactions while calling for an investigation into “potential insider trading.” At a June 3 Senate hearing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rejected the suggestion that Trump was personally running the trades, saying, “President Trump is not sitting in the Oval Office engaging in a high-frequency trading strategy. Clearly, he had an outside manager who was doing that.”
Investment professionals who reviewed the data for CBS News did not agree on what the trading pattern meant. David Salem, a portfolio manager at Hedgeye Asset Management, said the activity looked like tax-loss harvesting and direct indexing, strategies that can involve frequent buying and selling to track an index while reducing taxable gains. He said he saw no evidence of insider trading, while adding that he could not “prove a negative.”
Eric Diton, president and managing director of the Wealth Alliance, said he could not identify a strategy that would justify thousands of trades in one quarter. “I can't come up with a rationale for that amount of trading for anyone,” he told CBS News.
Stock trading by a sitting president is not illegal, and presidents are exempt from a major conflict-of-interest law that requires many other federal officials to recuse themselves from matters affecting their finances. Still, the filing has renewed debate over whether presidents and other senior officials should be allowed to own and trade individual stocks while making policy decisions that can move markets.
Most modern presidents have used blind trusts or limited their holdings to diversified funds to avoid conflicts or the appearance of them. Trump has not placed his assets in what ethics experts describe as a true blind trust.
The Trump Organization said the investment structure was designed to keep a separation between Trump and the independent managers overseeing the accounts. “Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments,” the organization said.
The disclosure is also feeding broader legislative pressure on Capitol Hill. Sen. Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, has cited the trades while pushing a bill to bar officials across all three branches of government from owning or trading stocks. A separate bipartisan Senate proposal, the HONEST Act, would ban trading by members of Congress as well as the president and vice president, though it has not reached the Senate floor.
For now, the filings show the scale and timing of the transactions, but not the intent behind them. That gap is likely to remain central as lawmakers, ethics specialists and the president’s representatives argue over whether the current disclosure system is enough.
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