Trump's Trust Disclosed 3,700 Trades. We Marked Them to the Tape.

The Filing Landed Mid-Flight

On Tuesday, May 13, Air Force One landed in Beijing carrying the President of the United States and a manifest of chief executives: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, David Solomon, Larry Fink, Jane Fraser, Stephen Schwarzman, Kelly Ortberg. Xi Jinping told the visiting CEOs that China's door to American business would "open wider."

The next day, back in Washington, the Office of Government Ethics released two filings showing that Donald Trump's trust had spent the first quarter actively trading stocks - more than 3,700 transactions between January and March, worth somewhere between $220 million and $750 million.

Seven of those eight CEOs run companies that appear in the filings.

We used Barebone to cross-reference every dated purchase in the disclosure against the administration's own policy calendar - export rules, contract announcements, public endorsements - and then marked the headline buys to today's close. The arithmetic: AMD +97.9% since the trust's January 6 purchase. Intel +139.1% since March 2. Dell +92.0% since February 10. The S&P 500 over the same windows: about +7%.

One more number, and it's the one this article is actually about. The amount of that performance available to anyone reading the filing when it became public this week: none of it.

Sixty Trades a Day, Months Late

Start with what the documents are. Under the STOCK Act - the 2012 law requiring federal officials to disclose securities trades - the president files periodic transaction reports, OGE Form 278-T, within 30 days of learning about a trade and never more than 45 days after it happens. Amounts are reported in bands ("$1,000,001 - $5,000,000"), not exact figures. No prices, no timestamps.

The two reports released this week were certified on May 8 and received by OGE on May 12. They cover trades going back to early January - the January 6 chip purchases you'll meet below reached OGE 126 days after execution, nearly three times the statutory limit. The filing carries its own confession: a notation that the filer paid late fees.

Inside: over 3,700 transactions in a single quarter, roughly sixty per trading day, spanning hundreds of names and a pile of municipal bonds. Presidents from both parties spent the past half-century parking their wealth in blind trusts, index funds, and Treasuries precisely so this document could never exist. This week's coverage could not name a modern precedent for a sitting president's account actively trading single stocks.

The White House response: "President Trump's assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest." The Trump Organization went further:

"Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions. Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments."

Hold both claims in mind. They matter for how you read what comes next.

Buy, Policy, Pop

The pattern that jumps out of the filing is a three-beat sequence: the trust buys, the government acts, the stock moves.

Buy date	Name	Disclosed size	What followed
Jan 6	Nvidia	$500K - $1M	Jan 13: Commerce publishes rule permitting H200 sales to China
Jan 6	AMD	$50K - $100K (≥$740K across Q1)	Jan 13: same rule clears AMD's MI325X for China; AMD +6.4% that day
Feb 10	Dell	up to $5M	May 8: Trump tells a White House event to "go out and buy a Dell"; stock closes +13.1% at a record
Feb 10	Axon	$1M - $5M	Feb 24: ICE announces a $220M Taser spending plan
Feb 10	Nvidia	$1M - $5M	May 13 - 15: Beijing summit, with chip exports on the table
Mar 2	Intel	not specified	April earnings repriced the stock; the U.S. government already owns 9.9%

Take the January 6 chip trades first, because they look the most damning and turn out to be the most instructive. On January 13 - seven days after the purchases - the Commerce Department published the rule allowing Nvidia's H200 and AMD's MI325X to ship to China: roughly ten Chinese firms cleared, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, capped at 75,000 units per customer, with the U.S. government taking a 25% cut of sales. AMD jumped +6.4% on the rule. Nvidia, contrary to the viral retellings, rose half a percent.

Why the muted reaction? Because the policy wasn't news. Trump had announced the H200 decision on December 8 - a month before the trust bought the stock. The rule in January was codification. Whoever (or whatever) bought Nvidia and AMD on January 6 was buying after the public announcement and before the paperwork - exactly what thousands of momentum funds did that same week.

Dell is the cleaner story. The trust bought up to $5 million of Dell on February 10 at a close of $126.01. On May 8 - the same day, it happens, that the president certified this filing - Trump thanked Michael and Susan Dell at a White House Mother's Day event and told the country to "go out and buy a Dell." The stock rose as much as 14.6% intraday to an all-time high of $263.99 and closed at $260.46, up 13.1% - putting the trust's position up +106.7% in under three months. The Dell family had committed $6.25 billion to the administration's "Trump Accounts" savings program in December. Dell's fundamentals did real work too - the company booked more than $64 billion in AI orders in its fiscal 2026 - but fundamentals don't usually arrive in a single 13% session timed to a presidential remark.

And Intel: the trust's March 2 purchase, at a close of $45.50, is a sitting president's account buying stock in a company his own government owns 9.9% of - a circularity we wrote about last week, and one with no modern precedent at all.

Mark all four episodes to today's close and the scoreboard is lopsided:

Every bar beats its benchmark by a multiple. Now for the part the highlight reels leave out.

The Stack Reading - and the Ballast

Sort the buy side of the filing by what the companies actually do, and a familiar architecture appears - the same one we've mapped in AI portfolios all year:

Layer	Disclosed names
Apps & cloud	Microsoft, Oracle, ServiceNow, Adobe, Amazon, Alphabet
Chips	Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Texas Instruments
Chip-making equipment	Lam Research
Servers & storage	Dell, SanDisk
Government software & hardware	Palantir, Axon

The repetition is striking: eleven separate Oracle purchases, eleven in Texas Instruments, eight in Adobe, nine in Motorola Solutions. Read uncharitably, this is a bet that America wins the AI race, held by the one person who writes the rules of that race. The trades and the policies rhyme too often for comfort: chips bought the week export rules loosen, an AI server maker bought a quarter before a presidential endorsement.

But read the whole filing and the conspiracy gets blurrier. The same documents show Boeing, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, BlackRock, Blackstone, Bank of America, Meta, Apple, Procter & Gamble - and a long tail of municipal bonds. Sixty trades a day across hundreds of names is not how a person trades on secrets. It is how a brokerage algorithm rebalances a large tech-tilted account, which is precisely what the Trump Organization says this is.

Here is the uncomfortable middle ground both sides skip: it doesn't matter which story is true. If the managers pick the stocks, the president still profits from his own policy decisions, in positions the public learns about a quarter late. The conflict isn't in the stock-picking. It's in the structure - and the structure is now disclosed, recurring, and legal.

The irony is on the record. In his February State of the Union, the president urged Congress to pass the Stop Insider Trading Act "without delay," so that members of Congress can no longer "corruptly profit from using insider information." The bill covers Congress. It does not cover the presidency. Representative Mark Takano's reply made the rounds within hours: "How about you first?"

What Copying Is Actually Worth

Which brings us to the obvious question: can you trade this?

The disclosure regime answers it for you. Here is each headline position's move from the trust's buy date to May 14 - the day the filings hit the press - next to what was left for anyone copying at that point:

By the time the documents were public, Nvidia had already moved +25.9% from the January 6 buy, AMD +109.8%, Dell +96.7%, Intel +154.8%. The next session - today - all four closed red: Nvidia -4.4%, AMD -5.7%, Dell -2.4%, Intel -6.2%, against -1.2% for the S&P. A copier's first session ended underwater in all four names. One day proves nothing about the next year. It proves everything about the entry: disclosure-based copying buys you the top of the chart, months after the information mattered.

The longer-run evidence says the same thing more politely. The ETF that copies congressional Democrats' disclosed trades - NANC, launched February 2023 - has returned roughly +93% since inception against +79% for the S&P 500. Real outperformance, about four points a year. But look inside and it's a mega-cap tech fund: Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon at the top, riding the same AI trade as every index investor. The edge attributable to political information, after three years of data, is hard to distinguish from "owned big tech." Wall Street has not "quietly made billions copying politicians." It made billions owning the Nasdaq, with extra steps.

Where the Insider Story Breaks

We promised receipts for the pattern; honesty requires receipts against it.

The order of operations exonerates the loudest example. The December 8 H200 announcement preceded the January 6 Nvidia buy by a month. Buying after a public policy announcement isn't inside information - it's reading the news.

The trust sold its biggest winner at the wrong moment. The filings show Palantir bought in January ($65K - $150K), then sold - $1.1 million to $5.3 million - in February. That February, Palantir signed an agreement with DHS reported near $1 billion and landed a Pentagon AI contract above $1 billion. A book trading on government foreknowledge does not dump Palantir the month the contracts land. It bought some back in March, smaller.

The math runs on assumptions. Disclosures give ranges and dates, not prices, so all our return figures assume execution at the trade date's close. The real entries could be better or worse, and the position sizes could sit anywhere inside bands that span 5x.

Base rates cut against the pattern. Sixty trades a day across hundreds of names guarantees that some buys will land days before favorable policy, by pure volume. We counted the four cleanest episodes; we did not count the dozens of disclosed buys that preceded nothing at all. Selection is doing some of the work in every viral version of this story - including, to a degree, ours.

What cannot be explained away: the late filing, the same-day certification and Dell endorsement, and a disclosure regime where the watchdog, OGE, won't even answer questions about how the account is managed. Both the damning read and the innocent read survive the documents. That is itself the finding.

What to Watch From Here

The filing tells you where policy has been. The useful signals are about where this regime goes next.

The Q2 filing's timing. Trades from April and May are due within 45 days. If the next 278-T arrives on schedule, the lag shrinks from a quarter to six weeks - still stale, just less so. If it's late again, the penalty is a fee and the information stays private through another policy cycle. Watch which one happens.

Whether the disclosure-day pop appears. If presidential filings start moving stocks the day they drop, the market is telling you it believes the signal - and the signal will start getting consumed at the filing, not the trade. Today it did the opposite.

The executive-branch carve-out. The Stop Insider Trading Act will either gain an amendment covering the presidency or pass without one. Either outcome answers, on the record, whether this becomes the permanent shape of American market structure: a head of state with a disclosed nine-figure book, marked to his own decisions.

The portfolio is public now. The information advantage never was - and the tape this week priced both facts within a day of each other.

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Data: Barebone | Sources: OGE Form 278-T periodic transaction reports (certified May 8, 2026), U.S. Commerce Department advanced-computing export rule (January 13, 2026), 2026 State of the Union address, White House and Trump Organization statements (May 14 - 15, 2026) | Data as of May 15, 2026