Donald Trump disclosed more than 1,000 purchases and sales of corporate securities in June, a sweeping set of trades that included multiple moves in Netflix, The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast and Amazon. The filing, released by the Office of Government Ethics, shows a president who was active in the market throughout the month rather than making one or two isolated moves.
The June report included several trades in the same companies on different days. Trump sold Netflix shares four times, including between $500,001 and $1 million on June 18 and between $50,001 and $100,000 on both June 12 and June 24. He also bought Netflix twice in small lots, purchased The Walt Disney Co. on June 3 and again in a larger tranche on June 18, bought Warner Bros. Discovery on June 16, and traded Amazon and Comcast repeatedly across the month.
That pattern is what makes the disclosure stand out now. The White House has previously said the president’s stock and bond portfolio is independently managed, and an official said Trump does not have the ability to direct, influence or provide input on when investments are bought or sold. The administration has also said the holdings sit in discretionary accounts and are invested through computer-based model portfolios that automatically mirror recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.
Even so, the June filing shows a concentration of activity in companies that have had regulatory business before the Trump administration. Disney is challenging the FCC over an order involving the licenses of its eight owned stations, and the Justice Department approved Paramount’s proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery on June 12. The disclosure does not say whether any of the trades were tied to those matters, but it does show repeated buying and selling in the same names while those companies were in the regulatory orbit of the federal government.
The report also leaves one basic question unanswered: how much all of those June trades added up to. The filing lists ranges rather than exact dollar amounts, so the full value of Trump’s buying and selling cannot be pinned down from the disclosure alone. What is clear is that the month produced an unusually large volume of trading for a sitting president, and that the next round of filings will be watched for whether the pace continues.
