Trump Filed 1,156 Stock Trades in July, Selling Up to $31 Million in Microsoft While Bessent Reported Just 29 Trades All Year

Since the Office of Government Ethics released Trump's July trading disclosure on Tuesday, Sept. 22, followed a day later by Bessent's annual 2025 filing, the gap between the two men's portfolios has become the numbers story of the week.

Trump's accounts recorded 1,156 transactions in July alone: 440 purchases and 716 sales, according to the OGE filing reported by Fortune. That's nearly 40 times Bessent's total of 29 transactions for the entire prior year, a comparison first drawn by Business Insider and repeated by Fortune, Traders Union and other outlets.

What he sold

The South China Morning Post's review of the filing found Trump offloaded up to $31 million in Microsoft shares across six trades in July, along with up to $26 million in Amazon, $630,000 in Meta Platforms, and $365,000 in Alphabet. He also sold roughly $1 million in Nvidia across two trades while buying about $1 million more in Nvidia the same month, per SCMP.

The dollar totals across sources don't match cleanly because OGE filings only require ranges, not exact figures. Fortune's analysis puts Trump's July activity at somewhere between $79 million and $270 million combined. Traders Union, using the same underlying filing, calculated at least $44.6 million in purchases and $34.5 million in sales. Both figures come from the identical disclosure; the spread just reflects how wide OGE's reporting brackets are.

Bessent's much shorter list

Bessent's 2025 filing showed 29 transactions, all sales, totaling between $2.3 million and $5.1 million according to Traders Union. Most involved his interests in Key Square Partners, the hedge fund he founded in 2015 and left to become Treasury Secretary, plus individual stock sales in companies like Verizon and Archer-Daniels-Midland, per Fortune.

Bessent was also fined $200 for misclassifying a $100,000 to $250,000 JPMorgan Chase holding tied to his husband, John Freeman, which the filing says was corrected and divested in July 2025, according to Traders Union.

The difference isn't accidental. As a cabinet member, Bessent was legally required under 18 U.S. Code 208 to divest or restructure most of his holdings to avoid conflicts of interest. The president and vice president are exempt from that statute. Trump's own stated support for a congressional stock-trading ban would not apply to his own office either, Business Insider noted.

The White House defense

A White House spokesperson told Fortune that Trump's assets sit in a trust managed for his children, and that the trade volume comes from "computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000." Business Insider's reporting adds a plausible mechanism: these trades track a direct-indexing strategy, which lets investors mirror a broad index while harvesting individual stock losses for tax purposes. Under that explanation, the 1,156 trades likely reflect automatic rebalancing rather than Trump personally deciding to dump Microsoft or Amazon.

If the strategy is genuinely automated and mechanical, it would undercut the idea that Trump is actively timing trades around, say, tariff decisions or tech regulation he controls. No source here presents evidence he is personally directing specific stock picks, and no investigation or charge has been filed alleging insider trading.

But the volume itself remains extraordinary by any historical measure. Dan Weiskopf, a portfolio manager at Tidal Financial Group who runs ETFs tracking politicians' trades, called it ironic that Trump has backed tighter trading rules for members of Congress while his own accounts operate on a scale no lawmaker comes close to. Walter Shaub, the former OGE director, said in 2017 remarks that Trump's approach to handling his finances 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." Every modern president since the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 adopted a blind trust or stuck to diversified funds specifically to avoid this kind of scrutiny.

The president's OGE filings showed more than 21,000 transactions during his first year back in office, a pace that has continued into 2026. Nothing in the law requires that to change. The stock market itself sits near record territory, with the Nasdaq notching fresh closing highs this week, according to Opening Bell Daily, meaning Trump's tech sell-off came while the sector he trimmed was still climbing.

OGE will keep publishing monthly reports on Trump's trades because the law requires it, and nothing currently on the books forces him to divest, adopt a blind trust, or explain individual transactions beyond the broad ranges already filed. Whether Congress moves on a stock-trading ban that actually covers the presidency remains an open question with no legislation currently advancing.