President Donald Trump’s financial accounts made nearly 40 times as many trades in one month as those belonging to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a Wall Street veteran with decades of experience.
Trump earlier this week disclosed 1,156 transactions made by accounts in his name in July, including 440 purchases and 716 sales, according to a report filed with the Office of Government Ethics. In total, his transactions represented at least $79 million and at most $270 million in trades, according to a Fortune analysis of the report. The exact dollar amount associated with each trade was not disclosed.
That compares with Bessent, who disclosed just 29 transactions for all of 2025.
All of Bessent’s transactions were sales, according to an Office of Government Ethics report. Several of the transactions involved his interests in entities related to Key Square, the hedge fund he founded in 2015 and left to join the administration. Others were sales of individual stock in companies like Verizon and Archer-Daniels-Midland. A JPMorgan Chase stake owned by Bessent’s husband John Freeman was also inadvertently reported as a deposit account previously and was adjusted, according to the report.
Bessent agreed to divest assets that could conflict with his new role when he agreed to become Treasury secretary.
As for Trump’s transactions, a White House spokesperson previously told Fortune the president’s assets are held in a trust measured by his children. Meanwhile, the large number of transactions is due to third-party “computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000,” the spokesperson told Fortune.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
A federal conflict of interest law 18 U.S. Code 208 legally prevents most federal officials from acts affecting a personal financial interest, but this doesn’t apply to the president and vice president. Trump’s volume of trading has ramped up during his second term. A disclosure filed with the OGE showed the president’s accounts recorded more than 21,000 transactions during his first year back in office.
To be sure, it’s unusual for a president to maintain ownership of an actively traded portfolio of individual securities while in office. Since Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, all modern presidents have either adopted a blind trust or limited their investments to non-conflicting assets like diversified mutual funds, said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, in 2017 remarks.
Just months before resigning as director of the OGE during Trump’s first term, Shaub said in remarks at the Brookings Institution Trump’s plan to handle his financials while in office, “doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the past four decades has met.”
The scale of transactions stemming from Trump’s accounts has also prompted criticism from politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who in a letter to Trump said: “The sheer volume of this trading activity and the timing of a number of transactions, raise questions about whether you are using your knowledge of government activities, your official authority, or the vast megaphone provided by the Presidency to make investments or move markets to your personal benefit…”
Yet meanwhile, Trump has backed new restrictions on stock trading for members of Congress. The Trump administration in July said it “strongly supports” the Stop Insider Trading Act, that would prohibit members of Congress and their families from buying stock in companies while in office. The bill was opposed by some Democratic lawmakers because it includes a provision that would impose new ID requirements for voting in federal elections.
While the House passed the bill this summer, it is still being considered by the Senate. The bill’s restriction on trading would not apply to the president and vice president.
