U.S. President Donald Trump during an event in the Eugene Levy Fieldhouse at SUNY Rockland Community College in Suffern, N.Y., on Friday.Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images
The funniest thing keeps happening in the financial markets.
Just before Donald Trump drops some bombshell news, a bunch of mysteriously well-timed bets are placed, paying off obscene amounts of money once the announcement lands.
Suspicious trades have become a fixture of Mr. Trump’s major policy moves, whether they pertain to tariffs, the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro or the war in Iran.
It’s almost like someone knows exactly what Mr. Trump is going to say, and when.
And now we have new details of Mr. Trump’s own investments. His accounts have executed thousands of stock trades this year alone, plenty of them coinciding with market-moving news initiated by Mr. Trump himself.
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It’s obvious Mr. Trump is leveraging the presidency for immense financial gain. His first year back in office was the most profitable of his life, bestowing US$3-billion in wealth on the family fortune, according to Forbes.
Mr. Trump’s self-enrichment campaign comes at a cost to us all. It rips off those on the other side of those trades. And it undermines the fairness of the public markets.
This is bad for anyone with a vested interest in U.S. stocks, which includes pretty much every Canadian. Our major public pension plans alone hold at least $300-billion worth of American equities. There are workplace pensions on top of that. Mutual funds. And the ranks of everyday investors who have piled into U.S. index funds.
The cost is not strictly an abstract one. A little more than a year ago, Mr. Trump stood in the Rose Garden and happily pummelled the world with absurd tariffs. In the stock market freakout that followed, defined benefit pension plans in Canada saw their $18.4-billion surplus virtually wiped out in just two days, according to Aon’s pension risk tracker. Their funded ratio dropped to its lowest since June, 2023.
A few days after that, some anonymous traders started betting heavily on U.S. stocks. For one fund that tracks the S&P 500 index, the number of contracts leapt to more than 10,000 a minute, up from the hundreds, according to a BBC report.
Just 18 minutes later, Mr. Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs. Whoever seemed to anticipate the news that day made out very well, as did the U.S. President himself, whose stake in Trump Media rose by at least US$400-million in a matter of hours.
In the aftermath, several Democratic senators asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Mr. Trump’s tariff announcements “enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public.”
The SEC seems committed to leaving every stone unturned.
There’s no evidence Mr. Trump himself directed any illicit trades. But the evidence all points in the same direction. Massive trades are repeatedly executed moments before major developments that only Mr. Trump’s inner circle could have known about.
Trump’s ‘buy’ tip on social media before his tariffs pause made money for investors who listened
Lucrative trades anticipating Trump’s major policy announcements warrant scrutiny, experts say
In March, more than US$800-million worth of oil futures changed hands just minutes before Mr. Trump announced on Truth Social that strikes on Iran’s infrastructure would be postponed, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Same thing a couple weeks ago, as detailed by the influential market commentator The Kobeissi Letter. In the early hours of May 6, someone bet nearly US$1-billion on crude oil shorts, which pay off if the price of oil drops. About an hour later, Axios reported that a deal to end the war in Iran was in the works. Oil prices quickly dove by 12 per cent, and those shorts netted a cool US$125-million.
There are also problems with the investments that we know for sure are on the President’s behalf. A U.S. government filing released last week detailed roughly 3,500 stock trades in Mr. Trump’s investment accounts since he returned to office.
Some of those trades have their own red flags: A purchase of Nvidia Corp. shares, one week before the U.S. government cleared the company to sell some of its AI chips to China, for example. Mr. Trump’s accounts also loaded up on Palantir Technologies Inc. shares just before he promoted the company on social media.
Lucrative trades anticipating Trump’s major policy announcements warrant scrutiny, experts say
Some of the U.S. President’s spokespeople have said the investment accounts are managed independently by third-party financial firms. Others in the White House claimed Mr. Trump’s children manage the assets. Mr. Trump’s son Eric has said the family’s assets are held in a “blind trust,” but there’s no evidence of such an arrangement.
Meanwhile, the Trump family has gone on a business blitz around the world, parlaying the power of the presidency into lucrative deals with foreign governments – something Mr. Trump restrained in his first term.
No more. “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to,” Mr. Trump told The New York Times in January.
He’s right, presidents are exempted from federal financial conflicts-of-interest laws.
He’ll walk away rich, and we’ll all be poorer for it.