Source: Wall Street News
Newly disclosed documents from the U.S. government have brought Trump's capital market operations during his second term under intense scrutiny.
According to financial disclosure documents released by the U.S. Government Office of Ethics (OGE) on Thursday, Eastern Time, Trump engaged in large-scale securities transactions in the first three months of 2026, with a total transaction value of at least $220 million, and possibly as high as $750 million based on the upper limit of the disclosure range. These transactions involved thousands of securities trades related to large U.S. listed companies.
Media reports, citing OGE filings, indicate that these transactions span multiple sectors including technology, finance, and telecommunications, and involve core U.S. stock assets such as Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, Broadcom, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America.
Because the U.S. federal disclosure system only requires officials to declare the trading range, without disclosing specific prices, timings, or profit and loss details, it is impossible for outsiders to accurately determine the actual scale of their profits.
Trump's assets are currently held in a trust controlled by his children, with some transactions showing that brokers acted as his agents. Regarding the aforementioned filings, the White House press office referred media inquiries to the Trump Organization, whose lawyers did not respond to media requests.
The White House emphasized last year that Trump and his family were not directly involved in specific investment decisions, that the assets were managed by third-party financial institutions, and that the assets had passed federal ethics review.
However, given the Trump administration's frequent introduction of tariffs, technology regulations, fiscal stimulus, and industrial policies, the presidential deal list released this Thursday is bound to quickly spark heated discussions on both market and ethical fronts.
Major sell-offs of shares in three tech giants: Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.
The documents show that Trump reduced his holdings in three of his core technology stocks by the largest amount in the first quarter.
The sales by Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all fell into the highest tier of the disclosure range—between $5 million and $25 million per transaction. This means that the scale of these three companies' share reductions was the most prominent among their overall trading activities.
It's worth noting that reducing holdings does not represent a complete sell-off. The documents also show that Trump maintained small-scale purchases in all three companies mentioned above.
Meta's multiple purchases occurred in early 2026, with individual purchases ranging from $1,001 to $500,000;
Amazon and Microsoft's purchases ranged from $1,001 to $5 million.
This "selling large and buying small" trading pattern indicates that it maintains a certain degree of proactive exposure management for these three stocks, rather than simply clearing out its positions in a directional manner.
The semiconductor sector saw a large influx of new positions, led by Nvidia and Broadcom.
While reducing some of his existing positions, Trump established a number of new semiconductor positions in the first quarter, which is one of the most closely watched directional signals in this disclosure.
Documents show that Nvidia and Broadcom both received new purchases in the range of $1 million to $5 million. Texas Instruments, Synopsys (a chip design and electronic automation software provider), and Cadence also appeared in the new purchase records of this magnitude.
Apple also received large buy orders, with each order ranging from $1 million to $5 million.
The document specifically points out that Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon all recorded "unsolicited" transactions ranging from $1 million to $5 million. These transactions were initiated by brokers without formal client instructions and were mainly concentrated in March.
Software stocks are buy the dips, with Oracle, Adobe, ServiceNow, and Workday all entering the market.
Another noteworthy structural operation in this disclosure is the concentrated buying in the enterprise software sector.
The documents show that Oracle, ServiceNow, Adobe, and Workday all have records of new warehouses exceeding one million US dollars.
The disclosure documents indicate that the aforementioned purchase of software stocks occurred against the backdrop of a significant discount in the sector due to concerns about the impact of AI and a decline in earnings visibility.
This trading window coincides closely with the overall valuation correction in the software sector during the first quarter. The market generally believes that the pressure of AI big data models replacing traditional enterprise software vendors is one of the core factors suppressing the sector's performance.
Dell and Intel: Two Deals Draw Extra Attention
Two other transactions in the document are particularly noteworthy due to their special background.
Purchase records for Dell Technologies Class C shares show that Trump established a position of $1 million to $5 million on February 10, 2026.
The disclosure documents indicate that this purchase occurred before Trump publicly endorsed Dell hardware products at a White House event in early May of this year. The timing of the two events has raised questions about the relationship between policy signals and personal transactions.
Regarding Intel, documents show that Trump began increasing his stake in Intel through a series of transactions starting in early March 2026, many of which were marked as "non-voluntary delegation".
This move comes after the U.S. government decided to acquire a significant stake in the domestic chipmaker by the end of 2025.
Doubts about information advantage pose a deeper test to market trust.
The reason this disclosure quickly attracted widespread attention is that since Trump's second term, the US market has repeatedly seen a high degree of synchronization between "policy news and market anomalies".
Earlier this year, reports indicated that there were "exceptionally precise" trading cases before major policy announcements by the Trump administration, involving options, commodity futures, and prediction market bets, raising concerns among legal experts about insider information leaks.
Trump himself had previously faced questioning from Democratic lawmakers for publicly stating "now is a good time to buy" before the tariff policy adjustment, with some lawmakers calling for an investigation into whether there was market manipulation or insider trading involved.
Analysts point out that the core controversy lies not only in whether the transaction itself is compliant, but also in:
Does the president have access to information that ordinary investors cannot obtain?
Does their asset allocation have a potential correlation with policy trends?
And whether the timing of policy releases could affect changes in the president's family's wealth.
For financial markets, the deeper risk lies in the erosion of institutional trust.
Washington legal and regulatory figures worry that if markets begin to widely perceive policymakers as active traders, the long-established principles of fair trading in the U.S. capital markets will face substantial pressure.
Some Wall Street figures warn that this could trigger a more pronounced tendency toward "policy trading," with investors shifting their decision-making logic from economic fundamentals analysis to speculative positioning around presidential rhetoric and political actions, further increasing the politicization of US stock market volatility.
In accordance with U.S. federal ethics regulations, Trump’s annual full financial statement is expected to be released in the coming months, at which time the outside world will be able to obtain a more complete picture of his financial situation.
