On the morning of Monday, March 23, President Trump pulled his first “TACO” of the Iran war. After four weeks of fighting, with oil prices already up 55%, Trump had given Iran an ultimatum on Friday: make a deal within 48 hours, or the U.S. would strike its power plants and energy infrastructure.
But on Monday morning, Trump reversed course. In an all-caps Truth Social post, he announced the U.S. and Iran had been having “very good and productive conversations” and that he would extend the deadline for a deal by five days.
Wall Street, for the first time since the war began, exhaled. Stocks rose. Brent crude plunged nearly 11%. Energy stocks — one of the few reliable winners of the conflict — sold off with oil.
The brokerage account in Trump’s name spent the day buying them.
A first look at a president’s trading
According to the 113-page periodic transaction report released by the Office of Government Ethics on May 14, Trump’s brokerage account spent that same day buying a sweep of petroleum and gas stocks, including Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, along with defense and aerospace names like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics: the companies that stood to profit if the war dragged on.
The day wasn’t an outlier. The filing, which covers January through March, shows a consistent posture through the Iran conflict: as Trump prosecuted the war and told Americans it would end “soon,” the account in his name was hedging it, buying gold, Treasuries, and cash.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization, the family’s privately held conglomerate, told Fortune the brokerage accounts are operated by third-party financial institutions that have “sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.” Trades, the spokesperson wrote in a statement, are executed through “automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions,” and neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization “plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, told Fortune that Trump’s assets are in a trust “managed by his children” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.” Asked about the apparent tension between that statement and the Trump Organization’s claim that the third-party institutions have “sole” authority over the trades, Ingle told Fortune to “defer to Trump Org.”
There is nothing inherently illegal about a sitting president holding stocks—the criminal conflict-of-interest law that binds nearly every other executive-branch official exempts the president.
But for more than half a century, presidents have voluntarily steered clear of the appearance of a conflict, using blind trusts, index funds, or, in Jimmy Carter’s case, liquidation. So what’s notable here isn’t that Trump holds securities, but that the account in his name has been actively trading them.
“It’s an unusual position for a president to be in,” Richard Painter, a securities law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush, told Fortune.
Trump’s new filing appears to offer the first public look in modern presidential history at an active public-markets portfolio in a sitting president’s name. The Office of Government Ethics report documents 3,642 individual trades made through the account in the first three months of 2026—between $220 million and $750 million in volume at a pace of roughly 60 trades per day. The filing doesn’t always specify whether a given transaction is a stock, bond, or ETF.
“I’ve gone through every president,” Painter said, “I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.”
Since Lyndon Johnson pioneered the use of a presidential blind trust in 1963, every modern president has either placed their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees, held them in index funds and Treasuries, or, in Jimmy Carter’s case, liquidated all their assets (notoriously, his peanut farm). None have actively traded individual securities while in office. Until recently.
In Trump’s first term, his assets were held in the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which controlled his business empire, and the periodic transaction reports it produced drew little attention. Through the first year of his second term, the account traded almost exclusively in municipal and corporate bonds.
But even before the stock trading began, the arrangement drew immediate backlash from federal ethics officials.
Walter Shaub, then the director of the Office of Government Ethics, called Trump’s original trust arrangement “not even halfway blind” in a January 2017 speech at the Brookings Institution. He resigned in July of that same year after clashing with Trump over the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses.
Hedging the war he was prosecuting
The accumulation began the same day the war did. The disclosure reports trades only in ranges, not exact dollar figures, with purchases falling between $50,000 and $5 million depending on the position.
Markets generally divided into two camps: the risk-on assets—U.S. stocks, growth, tech—that investors buy when they’re confident the economy will grow , and the safe havens—gold, Treasuries, cash—they retreat to when they’re not. Through the Iran war, the account moved steadily from the first camp to the second, even as Trump told Americans the conflict was nearly over.
On March 2, the first trading day of the war, the account bought Newmont, the gold miner, for $50,000 to $100,000. On March 4, the day Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, it bought the iShares US Treasury Bond ETF for $250,000 to $500,000. The next day, it bought $500,000 to $1 million of the iShares Gold Trust.
The buying continued even as Trump publicly insisted the war was under control. On March 7, he announced that Iran had “apologized and surrendered.” On March 10, the account bought a sweep of international and emerging-markets exposure: Europe, Japan, Canada, and, in its largest single move of the day, an emerging-markets ETF in the $500,000-to-$1 million band. The next day, Trump told Axios the war would end “soon” because there was “practically nothing left to target,” and that it would end “any time I want it to end.”
The next day, Trump told Axios the war would end “soon” because there was “practically nothing left to target,” and that it would end “any time I want it to end.”
The next week, the account bought $1 million to $5 million worth of cash. The Strait of Hormuz has still not opened as of time of writing.
