Last week, President Donald Trump disclosed that he went on a corporate stock-trading spree earlier this year, doing so while he and his administration were promoting and doing business with some of the same companies.

Trump’s disclosure immediately generated outrage from detractors about potential self-dealing and conflicts of interest. Trump supporters offered pushback — including from Trump’s son, Eric Trump — that the president’s personal finances don’t affect his performance as the nation’s chief executive.

But what did Trump know about his stocks, and when did he know it?

Here’s what NOTUS has learned through its reporting.

Does Trump himself know what stocks are in his financial portfolio?

Yes, he does.

That’s according to a federal stock disclosure document that lists the names, dates and values of Trump’s stock trades across 112 pages. Trump personally signed the document on May 8, certified that “the statements I have made in this report are true, complete and correct to the best of my knowledge” and submitted it to the Office of Government Ethics.

A personal financial disclosure signed on May 8, 2026, by President Donald Trump. Office of Government Ethics

According to Trump’s disclosure, he made more than 3,500 individual stock trades between January and March. The president personally owns these stocks, per the disclosure — not his Trump Organization business, not his family, not the federal government.

Who actually manages Trump’s investments?

That’s not entirely clear.

When NOTUS contacted the White House last week, a spokesperson for the president declined to comment and deferred to the Trump Organization, the president’s business entity.

Kimberly Benza, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization, told NOTUS on Thursday that Trump’s investments are “maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.”

Benza continued: “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. They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management of any kind.”

A day later, the White House decided to comment after all, and Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, sent a seemingly contradictory statement to NOTUS.

“President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest,” Ingle told NOTUS. He referred follow-up questions about who manages the president’s investment portfolio back to the Trump Organization.

When NOTUS contacted the Trump Organization to clarify the apparent contradiction, Benza said that “all Trump assets are managed by the President’s children, and are invested blindly by financial institutions in broad market indexes. To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold at the discretion of any member of the Trump family would be a lie and blatantly false.”

Neither the Trump Organization nor the White House have named the people or financial institutions involved in the buying and selling of Trump’s stock holdings. They also did not say what direction, however specific or broad, Trump gives his financial advisers, now or in the past.

In a post on X responding to criticism by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Eric Trump on Friday offered another perspective that didn’t quite line up with the statements from the White House and Trump Organization.

China’s President Xi Jinping, center right, and U.S. President Donald Trump, center left, pose for a photo with Eric Trump and his spouse Lara Trump at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing on May 14, 2026. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via AP

“All of our assets are invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions in broad market indexes,” he wrote. He then repeated Benza’s statement: “To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false.”

By definition, a blind trust is a financial structure in which the owner is unaware of how their money is being invested. The president has certified in a government document that he is aware of what stocks he owns and that the stocks are not broad market index funds, but rather, individual corporate stocks.

What do ethics watchdogs say?

Government ethics advocates told NOTUS that lack of transparency on who manages Trump’s investments adds to questions about possible conflicts of interests that have followed Trump throughout his time in the Oval Office.

“The confusion from the White House as to who manages the president’s stock portfolios is deeply troubling,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of policy and government affairs at the Project On Government Oversight, told NOTUS in a statement.

“It would raise serious ethical questions if President Trump’s children do indeed manage his investments — it leaves open the possibility that Trump and his family are corruptly benefitting financially from Trump’s time in office,” Hedtler-Gaudette wrote. “This is why we need clear laws that ban the president, vice president, and their families from owning and trading stocks.”

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at the progressive advocacy group Public Citizen, told NOTUS that as president, “Trump is in an ideal position to know which of his official actions will affect the stock market and how, and bets heavily on the profitable stocks.”

What corporations are Trump investing in?

Trump’s recent stock purchases represent a departure from his investment patterns during the first year of his second presidential term, which largely consisted of corporate and municipal bonds.

For example, he purchased $1 million to $5 million in semiconductor company Nvidia stock. (By law, officials only have to report the broad ranges their transactions are within, not exact amounts.) He also sold $1 million to $5 million in the stock of Oracle, an internet infrastructure and tech company. Trump personally knows the leading executives of these companies, Jensen Huang and Larry Ellison, and both of these companies have received lucrative federal contracts.

President Donald Trump speaks with Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 19, 2025, in Washington. Evan Vucci/AP

That month, Trump also bought $1 million to $5 million worth of stock in Axon, a large federal contractor, which has a $220 million commitment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to buy Tasers.

Trump has also this year bought tens of millions of dollars worth of stock this year in companies the Trump administration regulates. These include corporate giants such as Palantir, Microsoft, Intel, Netflix, IBM, Qualcomm, Blackstone, Uber, Walmart, T-Mobile and Intuit.

Trump’s stock portfolio is not, by definition, part of a blind trust because he’s affirmed and certified that he knows what’s in it.

Did Trump break the law?

It’s perfectly legal for Trump, Vice President JD Vance and any member of Congress to buy and sell corporate stocks. Many do — Republicans and Democrats alike. In this respect, he broke no law.

Trump, however, did violate the disclosure provisions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act by not publicly reporting stock trades within 45 days of making them.

The financial disclosures documents that Trump filed last week — one with individual stock trades and another one with federal and municipal bonds — indicate he paid a $200 fine for reporting trades past the STOCK Act’s deadline.

What has Trump said about government officials trading stocks?

Trump made his stock trades amid congressional scrutiny over politicians trading stocks and whether lawmakers and other officials are using nonpublic information to game the stock market.

During his State of the Union address, Trump called on Congress to pass a stock trading ban “without delay.”

“As we ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market, let’s also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information,” Trump said on Feb. 24.

But the president has expressed no desire to extend such a ban to the White House. Last year, Trump blasted Sen. Josh Hawley, a fellow Republican, when the Missouri lawmaker helped advance a stock-ban bill that includes the president and vice president. Since then, the bill had languished in the Senate without a vote.

Sen. Josh Hawley. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call viaAP

“I don’t think real Republicans want to see their President, who has had unprecedented success, TARGETED, because of the ‘whims’ of a second-tier Senator named Josh Hawley!” Trump said in a statement at the time.

A few members of Congress, including Republican Rep. Jefferson Shreve and Democratic Rep. Julie Johnson, have divested from the stock market amid public pressure about their investments.

There is a growing bipartisan coalition of members — including Republican lawmakers such as Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett, and Democratic lawmakers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal — that has been pushing legislation to ban members of Congress from buying and selling stocks.

Has Trump promoted companies he has invested in?

Trump has directly promoted the companies he is heavily invested in.

On April 10, Trump wrote a flattering post about Palantir, only a few months after he purchased at least $260,000 worth of stock in Palantir, the defense and homeland security tech company,

“Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” he wrote, mentioning the company’s stock market ticker.

In February, Palantir also obtained a $1 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security, in part to develop artificial intelligence tools to support federal immigration agents.

On Feb. 10, Trump purchased $1 million to $5 million worth of Dell stock.

Just over a week later, he praised the technology manufacturing giant during a speech in Georgia, saying, “Go out and buy a Dell computer.”

Morris Pearl, chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires, an advocacy group pushing to increase taxes on the rich, told NOTUS that even the appearance of impropriety has the potential to hurt the long-term trust of investors.

“The reason we have such a successful financial industry here in the U.S. is because people from all over the world feel confident that if they send their money to U.S. stockbrokers, people aren’t going to take advantage of them unfairly,” said Pearl, who was a managing director of investment firm BlackRock. “Trump is destroying that, and I think that’s going to be very damaging to the U.S. financial industry in the long run.”

How have other presidents managed their investments?

The presidency is mostly exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws. But most modern presidents have abstained from trading individual stocks to avoid even the perception that they were using the power and platform of the presidency to play the stock market.

President Jimmy Carter famously put his peanut farm into a blind trust during his presidency — although he retained ownership, if not control, of the asset.

Quitting stocks was “the kind of thing Ronald Reagan did when he was coming in, because he was so rich — not Trump rich, but still very rich — and didn’t want people questioning whether he was acting in his best interest or Americans’ best interest. Trump did not do that,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told NOTUS.

The way Trump’s investment portfolio is set up, he has to acknowledge every quarter that he has full knowledge of which individual stocks he owns and which trades he discloses. Libowitz argues that a blind trust would be the best way to avoid the possibility of conflict of interest.

“Just knowing what’s in the trust can impact the president’s actions, because he can take action that will either help or hurt the companies that he’s invested in or not invested in,” he said. “That’s the reason that we want to see more separation between a president and their assets.”