Almost all of Trump's illegal stock market trades were made after he struck Iran

President Donald Trump is facing a new stock-trading mess after his latest financial filing showed 3,711 trades, with nearly all of them tied to shares in American companies.

Many of the companies in the report can be affected by federal decisions, including policy on defense, taxes, energy, tech, trade, and regulation. Over 2,000 trades landed in March right after Trump started a war with Iran at the request of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The filing was much bigger than a normal Trump disclosure. His usual reports tend to show hundreds of trades, not thousands. This one covered many securities, with several small trades spread across different companies. Some names were bought and sold more than once in the same day.

That pattern led market experts to say the activity looked more like automated portfolio trading than one adviser sitting there and picking stocks one by one. They also saw signs that weaker holdings were sold after losses, which can be used for tax-loss harvesting.

Advisers handled Trump’s accounts while automated portfolios bought and sold hundreds of stocks

The Trump Organization said Trump did not make the trades himself, and that said outside financial firms manage the President’s holdings and make decisions on allocation, trading, rebalancing, and portfolio management.

The company said the accounts use “automated, model-based portfolios and direct indexing strategies,” whatever that even means. Naturally also, Vice President JD Vance came out to defend Trump.

“The president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer, on his like Robinhood account, buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd,” JD said. “He has independent wealth advisers who manage his money.”

Robinhood Markets (HOOD) was not named as one of the traded stocks in the filing details provided, but JD used the app as an example while defending Trump. JD also said Trump, as “a wealthy person” who “has had success in business,” can hand his portfolio to professionals instead of managing it himself.

The trades took place when adjustments were done to several major indexes. One of the busiest days was the day when rebalancing of the S&P 500, S&P 600, S&P 400, and S&P 100 was done. Some FTSE Russell indexes were rebalanced and introduced new stocks.

Such an observation was very important since many times changes in models take place with adjustment to indexes.

According to Vasavada, about 90% of individual stocks from the filing aligned with the Russell 3000 Index. Thus, it proves the theory of index-link system rather than random trading.

The third finding related to the filing is the existence of clusters on the days with downturns. For example, there were 155 trades on February 12 and 124 trades on March 18. In both cases, S&P 500 dropped by over 1%. The selected days confirm that advisors may sell their positions for tax reasons.

Unsolicited trades surged after the Iran attack and raised the sharpest questions

The most politically sensitive part of the filing involved 625 trades marked “unsolicited.” That label means the transactions were not started by the broker. Most of the 3,711 trades involved US stocks, but the unsolicited category stood out because almost all of those trades happened in March.

Those trades surged on the first market day after the US attacked Iran. They were mostly purchases. They also looked less orderly than the index-related activity in the rest of the filing. That is why this section of the disclosure is getting the loudest attention.

The filing was submitted under the STOCK Act, which became law in 2012 under President Barack Obama. The law requires the President, Vice President, and members of Congress to report stock trades above $1,000 within 45 days of purchase.

Trump’s filing was meant to meet that requirement. Still, Trump was set to receive a $200 fine for late reporting on trades tied to Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT), the Washington Post reported.

The politics around the issue are messy because Trump called for Congress to pass the Stop Insider Trading Act during his February State of the Union address. The bill had been introduced in the House in January. Critics said it still had loopholes that could leave room for lawmakers to trade on private government information.

JD said on Tuesday that he and Trump support a ban on stock sales by members of Congress.

“All of us believe that nobody should be taking proprietary information gained from public service and buying and selling stocks,” JD said. “We want to ban that process.”

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