May 21, 2026
Jim Cramer has an opinion on nearly everything. But on Monday, for the first time in recent memory, he didn’t. On CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, co-host Carl Quintanilla noted President Donald Trump had been personally trading Intel stock in the first quarter — the same company the U.S. government took a 10% stake in last August. Cramer started to say the government might sell Intel shares to benefit Americans, but suddenly stopped talking, and said nothing coherent for 10 seconds straight.
Co-host David Faber then filled the air: “Got nothing to say?” And with Cramer still stuttering, Faber told the audience “We’re not having technical difficulties here, everybody but we gotta go.”
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Cramer never really answered.
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What ethics filings actually show
Last week, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) published two Form 278-T disclosure reports covering Trump’s personal financial activity from January through March 2026. The documents, more than 100 pages, show more than 3,700 individual stock transactions. That’s more than 40 trades per market day across a three-month period.
The cumulative value of the trades is listed in broad ranges, as required by federal ethics rules, rather than exact figures. At the low end, the total exceeds $220 million. The ceiling approaches $750 million. The filings don’t specify who directed the trades, and they don’t disclose exact prices, timing within the trading day or profit-and-loss figures. The president’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children, and some transactions indicate a broker acted as an agent.
The White House said Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children. “There are no conflicts of interest,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement to CNBC. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public.”
No charges have been filed. Under current law, presidents are not banned from trading stocks; they are only required to disclose transactions above $1,000 through OGE filings.
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The companies — and the timing
What’s drawing the most scrutiny isn’t the volume of the trades, but the overlap between what Trump’s account was buying and what his administration was doing.
According to CNBC, the filings show Trump’s biggest purchases skewed heavily toward technology. Among the three dozen transactions valued between $1 million and $5 million, the filings reveal purchases of ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), Motorola (NYSE: MSI), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN) and Dell (NYSE: DELL). His largest sales of Microsoft, Amazon and Meta (NASDAQ: META) all took place on February 10 in a single day of heavy activity.
Scripps News reported that Trump purchased millions of dollars of Oracle stock in early 2026, around the same time his administration was helping the company secure a deal to continue operating TikTok in the US.
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The Financial Times also noted that Boeing (NYSE: BA), Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and GE Aerospace — also in the trading portfolio — were companies whose executives accompanied Trump on his trip to China last week.
Capitol Trades reported that Trump bought $740,000 worth of AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) stock early this year, with about $50,000 - $100,000 bought on January 6, “just before AMD was authorized by the Department of Commerce to sell its chips to the Chinese customers on January 13.”
Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, told Bloomberg the volume looks more like “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” than a personal account.
“This is an insane amount of trades,” he said.
Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan government watchdog, provided the following statement to Scripps News: “Rather than avoiding transactions involving industries with business before his administration and assuaging conflict of interest concerns, as other presidents have historically done, Trump has prioritized serving himself at the expense of public trust once again.”
A departure from every recent president
Trump’s trading behavior is genuinely unprecedented among modern presidents. Bloomberg notes past presidents generally tried to sidestep even the hint of a conflict of interest. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both used blind trusts, so they wouldn’t know what their money was doing. Barack Obama stuck to Treasury bills and broad, diversified mutual funds. Joe Biden didn’t even hold a single individual stock while in office.
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Trump is the first sitting president to trigger the STOCK Act disclosure requirement, because he’s the first to actively trade individual stocks while still in office.
The Washington Post also reported that Trump missed the legally required 45-day deadline to disclose tens of millions of dollars in some of these trades. He was fined $200 for each late disclosure.
What this means for investors
These disclosures create a strange situation for ordinary investors. When a sitting president is actively buying and selling individual company stocks — including companies whose fortunes are directly shaped by his own administration’s policy decisions — it raises a question that current law doesn’t really settle: At what point does insider knowledge of policy become material non‑public information?
Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress and executive branch officials are prohibited from trading on material non-public information obtained through their official duties. The law applies to the president. Whether any of these specific trades crossed that line is up to prosecutors to determine, and so far, none have acted on it.
What investors can observe, without making any legal judgment, is a portfolio trading more than 40 times per market day, concentrated in tech stocks that are also the focus of the administration’s biggest policy moves, whose executives are flying on Air Force One, and in at least one case (Oracle), where the White House was directly involved in the deal‑making.
Cramer, to his credit, seemed to understand that. He just couldn’t figure out what to say about it.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
