Trump Says Independent Funds Manage His Investments While President

President Donald Trump is pushing back on scrutiny of his trading activity, telling reporters that outside firms make all the calls on his personal portfolio while he is in office. The comments came alongside a 2025 financial disclosure that showed a sharp jump in reported revenue and thousands of trades in names his administration directly regulates.

What Trump said

Trump on Wednesday brushed off questions about the amount of money reported in his sprawling 2025 financial disclosure, saying his investment decisions are made by outside parties and he is only profiting because the stock market is up.

“I don’t get involved in my personal — we have funds that run my money,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before boarding a Qatar-gifted jumbo jet that was converted to become the new Air Force One. Trump described the setup as a “blind account,” saying the managers take the money and he purposely never speaks to any of them, adding that they are big institutions that invest in whatever they invest in.

The disclosure numbers

Trump reported at least $2.24 billion in revenue last year based on the employment assets and income he disclosed, according to a CNBC analysis of his annual disclosure forms, compared with at least $622 million reported in 2024 before he returned to the White House.

The jump is largely due to roughly $1.2 billion in cryptocurrency-related income that Trump reported in his 927-page disclosure. Trump also disclosed receiving $635 million in royalties from what were described as “Celebration Coins,” tied to CIC Digital LLC, his memecoin business.

Trading activity that has drawn scrutiny

Trump has become the most active stock trader in presidential history, executing roughly 3,700 trades via independently managed accounts during the first quarter of 2026. The trades included Nvidia, whose advanced chips the administration approved for sale to China, along with Palantir weeks before Trump praised the company on Truth Social, and Pentagon contractors including Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman.

The Trump Organization has said his investment holdings are maintained exclusively in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions with sole authority over trading, rebalancing and portfolio management, executed through automated model-based portfolios and direct indexing strategies.

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Why the “blind trust” label is disputed

While Trump did transfer his assets into a trust, it is not blind, and the arrangement allows his children to make decisions about those assets on a day-to-day basis. Trump has certified in a government document that he is aware of what stocks he owns and that they are not broad market index funds, but rather individual corporate stocks.

Since Lyndon Johnson pioneered the 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 liquidated them, and none have actively traded individual securities while in office.

Options market and stocks to watch

Traders can watch the names showing up in the disclosures and press coverage for headline risk tied to policy decisions and Truth Social posts:

• NVDA: watch for flow around export-license headlines and any China-related chip policy shifts.
• PLTR: watch for reaction to federal contract news and presidential commentary.
• LMT, GD, and NOC: watch defense flow tied to Middle East posture and Pentagon budget headlines.
• INTC: watch for follow-through on the government stake angle and any additional federal involvement.

For more coverage of political trading and disclosure headlines, see other news on Unusual Whales.

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