Trump's unprecedented levels of stock trading

What do we know? Well, this is a financial disclosure that came out last month. And it was really remarkable because you saw 3,600-plus individual trades, most of them of individual companies. And the sheer volume of this is what's extraordinary. The portfolio leaned heavily into tech stocks and the major technology giants. You had Apple and Amazon and Microsoft and Oracle as some of the most bought and sold securities. But this is unprecedented in the sense we're talking about individual companies instead of index funds or a larger pool. And many of the companies you just name-checked have active interests before the federal government, point one. Point two, the president knows better than anyone any utterance from him can affect the stock of one of these companies. Point three, this president, more than his predecessors, has been open to the federal government negotiating share arrangements, purchasing some portion of privately held companies, all of which have implications for this portfolio. Yeah. And I just want to stipulate at the top the Trump Organization, which manages these funds, told us in a statement that the president/his family doesn't have any--

Direct. --visibility into what's being traded. This is all being handled by third-party investment managers. But some of the timing of these trades is interesting. Take, for example, NVIDIA, the chip maker. The first week of January, he traded up to $1 million worth of NVIDIA stock. And the next week, the administration loosened export controls around these chips to China. So now NVIDIA has an easier time selling its prized AI chips to China. The president bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Palantir, touted Palantir by its ticker name on his Truth Social account after that, and Eli Lilly, bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Eli Lilly. And the administration has been making it more-- making it easier to buy GLP-1s and policies-- And historically, presidents have had blind trusts where they are so far removed from it and the actions of the federal government as to be completely unaware. This is closer. I'm not saying it's illegal. I'm just saying it is closer than we've ever seen before. Yeah. And again, the Trump Organization says the president has no visibility into this. And what's actually interesting is the president is exempt from some of these conflicts-- conflict of interest laws that other federal officials have to abide by when it comes to policy decisions around their finances and that may benefit their finances. So there is some degree of trust with the public here that the administration and the president is saying, take our word for it, that he's not-- he is not involved in these trades. And yet anyone sitting at the top of the federal government is uniquely positioned to know things that no one else can know. And that creates the appearance of doubt. Well, and just looking at these 3,600 trades, one of the-- we talked to a bunch of seasoned money managers who were confused about why so many trades. One of one of the strategies that was thrown out there was a tax mitigation strategy, essentially, reducing the president's tax bill in the long term. But I just want to underscore that it's the trading of these individual companies that's unique, that's new, that's different. And I worked with a great team. If you go on cbsnews.com, you'll be able to see this interactive feature where you can click on the individual stocks and see the purchases and the sales over the course of--

What the kids call a dashboard. It's all right there. You can find it right there because of the excellent work of Michael Kaplan and his team. Thank you very, very much.

Thanks, Major.

Great to have you here.