Trump Account’s More Than 3,700 Trades 'Astonish Wall Street Insiders'

 

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President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.

The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.

“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account.

In the first quarter, the president bought at least $1 million each in companies including Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., Boeing Co. and Costco Wholesale Corp., according to the documents. Other trades involved eBay Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Uber Technologies Inc., AT&T Inc. and discount store Dollar Tree Inc.


The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.

At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general.

The White House dismissed questions about potential conflicts, with spokesman David Ingle saying that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public.” He added: “There are no conflicts of interest.”

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization earlier said that the president’s holdings are independently managed by third-party financial institutions who have control over all investment decisions, with trades executed through automated processes. Trump, his family members and his company play no role in making transactions, the spokesperson said. They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input, she added.


The trading volume exceeds anything Trump has previously reported. In the fourth quarter of last year, he made 380 transactions, mostly purchases of municipal debt, though he also bought some commercial paper, according to his filings.

He made his first disclosure of asset purchases in August, reporting 690 transactions he had made starting on Jan. 21, 2025, the day after the start of his second term. Those transactions, covering about seven months, totaled at least $103.7 million.


‘Baffled’

The president’s disclosures spurred questions from some on Wall Street who expressed surprise at the trading volume.

“I’m baffled,” said Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

“We’d need to see the actual trades to try and understand why anyone would want to do that much trading,” Diton added.

Adam Sarhan, founder of 50 Park Investments, said the frequency of trading was “tremendous.”

“What I really want to know is at the end of all those trades was the account positive or negative?” Sarhan said.

Trump has made a number of policy moves that affect the publicly listed companies he traded, and he interacts regularly with many of the executives of those firms. That includes Nvidia, whose chips, critical to AI development, require US government approval for foreign sales.

Trump pulled Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang into his recent trip to Beijing during a refueling stop, joining a delegation that included top executives from Boeing, Citigroup Inc. and Tesla Inc. as well as other major companies.


Six of Trump’s trades involved Intel Corp.; his administration hammered out an agreement to take a 10% stake for nearly $9 billion in the iconic chipmaker in August. Shares of the Santa Clara, California-based company gained 20% in the first quarter and more than doubled in April after delivering a sales forecast that shattered Wall Street expectations.

Trump’s comments haven’t always benefited the companies whose assets he trades. While in Beijing, his announcement that China would purchase 200 Boeing jets pushed shares down because the order was expected to be larger.

Netflix Inc. and Paramount Skydance Corp. battled to acquire Warner Bros Discovery Inc. in a months-long fight with both suitors raising potential antitrust concerns. Trump made investments related to all three companies. He bought a modest stake in Warner Bros. in March, worth at least $30,000, a stake in Paramount Skydance worth at least $15,000 the same month. He also had 19 transactions naming Netflix, including sales worth as little as $1,000 and as much as $5 million during the first quarter.


‘Huge Question Mark’

“All of this raises questions that you’d rather not raise as a president,” said Tuttle. “So now people are asking why is he buying Nvidia and other companies now? When you’re the president you know everything, so any stock you buy, there’s a huge question mark.”

Previous presidents divested assets or took other steps to avoid conflicts of interest or even the appearance of ethical issues while in office. George H.W. Bush had a blind trust that held his investments both while he served as vice president and when he became president himself in 1989. His successor, Bill Clinton, did the same after assuming office.

Federal law only required officeholders to report transactions involving securities after the passage of the STOCK Act in 2012, which strengthened disclosure requirements for executive branch officials and members of Congress.

Neither former President Barack Obama, whose money was invested in Treasury bills and broadly diversified mutual funds, nor Joe Biden traded stocks or bonds while in office. Trump is the first president who triggered the disclosure requirement.


$200 Fine

Trump’s biggest sales came on Feb. 10, when he unloaded holdings in three technology firms: Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., in amounts between $5 million and $25 million.

The tech giants’ performance has been mixed since then: Shares of Meta Platforms have lost almost 10% while Amazon shares have added some 30% following the stock’s best run for April since 2007. Microsoft shares have traded flat.

Federal ethics laws require officials to report trades no later than 45 days after they’re made. Both of Trump’s filings missed that deadline but the penalty in the law is nominal: a $200 fine for each late disclosure. Trump’s filings indicate he paid the fee on both.

Trump has dismissed critics who have accused him of taking financial advantage of being the US president. In a January interview with the New York Times, Trump said he didn’t get any credit for reining in his business interests in his first term.

“I got nothing but criticized,” Trump said.


In a separate matter, the government ethics office granted Trump a 45-day extension to file his annual financial disclosure. That document provides information on the value and income earned in 2025 from his sprawling business empire, which includes crypto, resorts, golf courses and his social media company.

The extension are routinely granted when requested. The disclosures, originally supposed to be filed Friday, are now due on June 29.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/trump-traded-nvidia-boeing-intel-030913697.html

Multiple sources report but X still footdragging: UAE Tried in Vain to Get Saudis to Partner on Iran Response

The United Arab Emirates tried to persuade neighboring states including Saudi Arabia and Qatar to take part in a coordinated military response to Iran’s strikes and was left frustrated when they refused, according to people familiar with the matter.

UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed held a series of calls with fellow leaders, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, shortly after the US and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-15/uae-tried-in-vain-to-get-saudis-to-coordinate-on-iran-response

After Supreme Court Rejects Attempt To Revive Virginia Congressional Map

 Hammering the last nail in the coffin of what could have been a significant midterm factor, the US Supreme Court on Friday rejected Virginia Democrats' request to use a new congressional district map, which was drawn to flip four House seats into Democratic control.

As is typical in this kind of "emergency" ruling, the court provided no legal rationale or vote count -- however no dissents were noted.  

The new map was expected to dramatically alter the composition of Virginia's US House delegation, boosting Democrats from their current slim 6-5 edge to 10-1 domination. For context, in 2024 presidential balloting, Virginia voters were split 52% for Democrat Kamala Harris and 46% for Donald Trump. 

On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court denied a request from Democrats and state officials to lift a lower-court order blocking certification of the April 21 redistricting referendum.

Voters approved the Democrat-accommodating map by a 52-to-48 margin, but a Virginia circuit court declared the referendum null and void, saying Democrats had run afoul of state constitutional measures that exist to fend off partisan gerrymandering. 

Virginia Gov Abigail Spanberger, seen here as a US House representative on Jan 6 2021, says she now wants to focus on Democrat turnout

After that setback, Democrats sought to salvage their new map with an appeal to the US Supreme Court, which has now failed. Two days earlier, Gov Abigail Spanberger had already waved a white flag of sorts, implying that Virginia's May 12 deadline for map changes made the emergency request to the US Supreme Court something of a moot point.

“What needs to happen is we need to focus on the task at hand, which is winning races in November,” she said.

"I believe, somewhat doggedly, that we will [gain] two to four seats in the House of Representatives. … That is my goal. That is what I know is possible.”

However, after the ruling, she opportunistically lashed out at the Supreme Court: 

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, criticized the decision, which she said had the effect of nullifying “the votes of more than three million Virginians.”

“As Governor, I will make sure voters know when and how to cast their votes this year. Because our votes are how we choose the representation we deserve,” she wrote on X.

The lead respondent, Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican, who is also legislative commissioner for the Virginia Redistricting Commission hailed the new ruling.

“The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed what we always knew: you cannot violate the Constitution to change the Constitution,” the state lawmaker wrote on X.

The Virginia battle was part of a nationwide saga that started last year, when Texas Republicans redrew their congressional map to gain seats, straying from what had been a fairly (but not thoroughly) universal norm that saw states refrain from redistricting that wasn't driven by once-a-decade census results. Following the lead of California Democrats who undertook their own maneuvers to offset the Texas map, the Virginia leftists who gained full control of state government in 2025 responded with a constitutional amendment allowing the General Assembly to temporarily redraw congressional districts outside the normal 10-year cycle -- specifically to “restore fairness” if other states gerrymandered (bases on the convoluted implication that varied wrongs against the citizenry of multiple states can add up to a national right).  

Despite the implosion of the Virginia Democrats' scheme, and the view that the net result of the redistricting war will flip seats to the GOP column, prediction-market participants lean heavily toward Democrats wresting control of the House from Republicans, who currently have a 217-212 edge over the Democrats. (One representative is an independent and there are five vacant seats owing to deaths and resignations.) 

Via Polymarket

Chalk up the difference between the redistricting outcome and the predicted 2026 House elections to resurgent price inflation springing from the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran, disenchantment with the broader economy, and a career-high disapproval rating for party standard-bearer Trump.  

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democrats-devastated-after-supreme-court-rejects-attempt-revive-virginia-congressional

Hochul-Mamdani’s new fees may cause chaos in NYC property taxes as next target eyed

 Tax-y Kathy is living for Zo-day.

New taxes targeting the rich pushed by Gov. Kathy Hochul this week may appease socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the short-term, but insiders warned they are so slapdash they’ll open cans of worms for the Big Apple’s future.

Hochul floated a proposal for a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes and entered discussions on a transfer levy on $1 million residences bought with cash as she and state lawmakers entered their sixth week of overtime haggling over the Empire State’s next budget.

But the 11th-hour pitches require sweeping changes to New York City’s famously convoluted property tax system that raised alarm bells with experts such as Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

“Should we rationalize our property and transfer tax system? Yes,” he said. “Should we do it piecemeal, 45 days into the state fiscal year based on unvetted proposals? No.

“That’s not the way for a good outcome.”

Mamdani has pushed to “tax the rich” not only to help close a reputed $5.4 billion budget shortfall for the city, but also to inject fairness into a system he contends is skewed toward favoring the wealthy.

The governor, however, firmly opposed Mamdani’s pitch to tax on the city’s millionaires, arguing it’d only drive them out of the city.

But Hochul, who is courting Mamdani’s progressive allies as she runs for re-election this fall, ended up partially flip-flopping as she backed a pied-à-terre tax on rich homeowners.

Mamdani quickly declared victory by shooting one of his trademark slick social media outside billionaire Ken Griffin’s $268 million Manhattan penthouses, declaring “Today we’re going to tax the rich.”

“The two fundamental facts here are that the mayor is unwilling to control spending and separately wants to be seen taxing the rich. And the practicality or sustainability of his solutions look to be afterthoughts,” Ken Girardin, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told The Post.

The controversial video infuriated Griffin, who pledged to add more jobs to Miami rather than New York as a “direct consequence.”

As the dustup and fears over a billionaire exodus, the actual details on the pied-à-terre tax remained murky.

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Mamdani stoked controversy with a video targeting billionaire Ken Griffin.Instagram/@nycmayor

Hochul cleared up some confusion Thursday when her office spilled that she envisions taxing second homes in condos and co-ops with assessed values exceeding $1 million and one- to three-family homes assessed at over $5 million.

The scheme would clamp down hard on condos and co-ops, which under city’s current assessment system are valued based on their potential rental value — a quirk that leads them to be substantially undervalued.

The plan would initially hitting those units that have an “assessed value” of $1 million — which officials contend is generally equivalent to a $5 million sales price — with the tax for the next five years.

After two years, the proposal envisions that the city would come up entirely new system of valuing condos and co-op properties that will lead to them being taxed the same as family homes.

Abir Mandal, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, generally agreed the city’s assessment system is broken, particularly for condos and co-ops.

But he argued there were too many unknowns in how Hochul’s proposal would shake out.

“Imposing a tax on top of that flawed assessment system, it’ll lead to a higher deadweight loss,” he said.

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Hochul opposed Mamdani’s push to impose a millionaires tax.Matthew McDermott for NY Post

“Do I support New York City going through a better assessment system? Yes,” he went on. “But we’ll just have to take a look at and see exactly what they come up with. It’s like if we don’t have details yet, they could come up with something that’s even worse than what they have right now.”

A proposed transfer tax being discussed by Hochul and lawmakers on cash purchases of homes worth more than $1 million is expected to raise another $160 million to help the city’s budget problems, Bloomberg reported.

A spokesperson for Hochul confirmed that she’s continuing to discuss the transfer tax proposal, but has yet to reject it like she has some other sweeping measures like income and corporate taxes.

Mandal dinged the tax, contending it’d make it more expensive to buy, and effectively sell, a property.

“They’re economically even more harmful because they decrease the liquidity in the market,” he said. “If you really want a freer market for housing available for people increasing the transfer tax is not a good proposal.”

The proposals unfolded against the larger backdrop of expanding spending in the city.

Mamdani’s executive budget hit $124.7 billion, buoyed by cash from Albany.

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But Hochul ended up backing a push to tax luxury second homes.

Hochul is pumping another $2 billion into the city to prop up an expansion of childcare services for two years, theoretically leaving the city on a cliff to backfill the funding on its own by then.

Big Apple taxpayers could also get walloped with northwards of $100 million in new pension costs alone if Hochul agrees to a sweetheart deal for New York’s powerful unions.

“Revenues are not a problem either for New York City or for New York State,” Mandal said.

“It’s the fact that spending has grown even faster than the revenues have grown, which have grown pretty rapidly.”

Republican and conservative pols roundly ripped the tax proposals.

“This is exactly how ‘tax the rich’ turns into taxing everybody else,” said City Councilman Frank Morano (R-Staten Island).

“A lot of middle-class New Yorkers bought modest co-ops or condos decades ago that now fall into these thresholds because of the insanity of the real estate market. They’re not oligarchs. They’re retirees, small business owners, and families who worked hard and played by the rules.

“And let’s be honest: if Albany and City Hall keep moving the goalposts from $5 million down toward $1 million assessments, people are right to wonder who gets targeted next,” he added.

Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens) argued that pied-à-terre owners already pay enormous sums in property taxes. She said when they leave, their tax burden will be shifted to other New Yorkers.

“There’s this mistaken belief out there that people will never leave New York no matter how high taxes go because ‘it’s New York,'” she said. “But people can easily move right across the river to Hoboken, take their tax dollars with them, and still be minutes from Manhattan.

“What we are seeing here is a short-term solution from the governor in an election year that will have long-term consequences for New Yorkers.”

The added taxes will add to New York’s poor tax standing among the states, said Heather Mulligan, president and CEO for The Business Council of New York State.

“We are already in last place in tax competitiveness. What are we trying to do, be in super-duper-extra last place?” she lamented.

https://nypost.com/2026/05/16/us-news/hochul-mamdanis-new-fees-may-cause-chaos-in-nyc-property-tax-system-as-critics-wonder-who-gets-targeted-next/

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Trump:-500K-fake-mail-In-ballots-found-in-Maryland/66306487

Media Lies About Obamacare And Medicaid Debunked

 The news stories are pretty much all the same. Heartless Republicans slashed Medicaid spending and let temporary “enhanced” Obamacare subsidies expire, and now millions are losing health insurance.

But buried deep within those stories, if it’s there at all, is the fact that when measured properly, enrollment for both programs is up.

Here’s a prime example.

Axios this week ran a story with the headline “Health program cuts hit home, fueling blame game.”

It begins by saying that “Sweeping changes that congressional Republicans made to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid are starting to take effect, fueling an election-year blame game over coverage losses” and that enrollment in Obamacare is down 1.2 million from last year.

It goes on to say that 20,000 people could lose Medicaid coverage in Nebraska alone thanks to the new work requirements included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

It’s only buried at the bottom of that story that Axios admits the truth:

Obamacare “enrollment will likely still be well above the numbers from before the enhanced subsidies were first passed in 2021, when there were around 12 million enrollees,” it grudgingly admits.

(Why isn’t that the headline?)

Even then, Axios leaves out the fact that those “enhanced subsidies,” passed by Democrats and signed by Joe Biden, were meant to be a temporary salve in the wake of COVID. Enrollment was always supposed to come back down.

The same is true with Medicaid. During COVID, states were banned from cleaning their enrollment rolls. The result was that enrollment exploded. Once that ban was lifted, states started cleaning up their rolls, and the numbers started to decline.

And while today’s news reports blare claims that millions will lose coverage, the truth is that the number of enrollees today is still higher than it was in 2020, before the massive COVID expansion.

Even though new Medicaid work requirements will thin enrollment somewhat going forward, in a decade it’s still forecast to be 73 million, which is higher than any time in the program’s history before 2016.

What’s more, the current enrollment forecast is in line with projections made before COVID, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.

Of course, the lie at the center of all these stories is that the bigger the enrollment in Medicaid and Obamacare, the better. The truth is that the ideal enrollment in these programs is zero. Because that would mean nobody is dependent on government to cover the cost of health insurance.

https://issuesinsights.com/2026/05/14/media-lies-about-obamacare-and-medicaid-debunked/