Tax Trade Clues

The published trading activity represents a huge jump from a typical Trump disclosure, which tends to show transactions numbering in the hundreds. More than 2,000 of the trades occurred in March as the war in Iran caused market volatility to surge.

The number of transactions and their breadth — encompassing hundreds of securities and many relatively small trades — indicates automated processes rather than a human manager making thousands of separate company-by-company calls. Some names were bought and sold more than once in a day, which may signal the filing is an aggregation of more than one account. Experts also said they see evidence of stocks being sold after poor performance, which suggests tax-related trading.

“Tax-loss harvesting is probably the single most common portfolio strategy we see among high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth investors today,” said Samir Vasavada, co-founder of Vise, an investment platform with about $80 billion in assets that offers custom indexing. “We believe the trading activity in President Trump’s 278-T filing is a likely example of what that looks like at scale.”

Aspects of the data were consistent with direct indexing. That’s when an investor owns the individual stocks in an index rather than shares in a fund doing the same, allowing them to harvest losses by selling losers while still broadly tracking a benchmark.

Many of the trades came on days when major indexes were reset. The second-busiest day of trading was March 23, coinciding with a rebalance of the S&P 500, 600, 400 and 100 indexes, as well as the addition of new stocks to certain FTSE Russell benchmarks.

Individual names in the filing show a roughly 90% overlap with Russell 3000 Index constituents, Vasavada said.

It all potentially helps explain some of the clustering of the trades, not only around index rebalancing but also on market down days that create opportunities to harvest losses. The filing shows 155 sales on Feb. 12 and 124 sales on March 18, days when the S&P 500 fell more than 1%.

“When you’re holding hundreds or thousands of individual positions and the system is scanning for losses to harvest every day, you end up with a lot of trades,” Vasavada said.

The data released was limited, which makes it difficult for analysts to nail down definitive conclusions. The disclosure only displays broad value bands rather than precise trade sizes, doesn’t show profit or loss on any position and offers no breakdown of activity by account.

Yet some patterns stick out. For instance, both January and February show a spike in trading the day before US inflation data is released, while activity in March was elevated on both the day of release and the day after.

These could be unrelated, calendar-based portfolio adjustments, or the actions of a macro or rates-sensitive fund. A jump in activity before the Federal Reserve meeting in March offers support to the latter theory.

Meanwhile, out of the 3,711 trades reported, most of which involved US stocks, 625 were categorized as “unsolicited” — a label that refers to transactions not initiated by the broker.

Those almost all occurred in March, surging on the first trading day after the US attacked Iran. They were overwhelmingly purchases, and appear more ad hoc than the systematic-looking trades elsewhere in the filing.

‘Amazing’ Volumes

What the data shows for sure is an unusually active trading footprint attached to a sitting president, who can change the outlook for companies, sectors or the entire market with either policies or pronouncements. Trump’s predecessors often used blind trusts or broad diversified mutual funds while in office.

“If you’re in the business of predicting contract awards, for example, then there might be some information embedded in these kinds of disclosures,” said William Cassidy, an assistant finance professor at Washington University who studies how political forces impact financial markets.

Unlike members of Congress, who may also be involved in policy affecting listed companies, Trump is unusual because he often comments directly on individual companies, said Barney Chen, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-wrote a paper on congressional trades.

For instance, the filing shows an unsolicited purchase of between $1 million and $5 million of Apple Inc. stock in early March, about a week before Trump publicly praised the company’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.

Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth professor who co-wrote the paper with Chen, said the volume of transactions connected to Trump was striking. He did not find, however, clear evidence of market-beating results.

“It’s amazing how much trading is happening,” he said. “We’re not finding strong evidence that he’s outperforming the market, even in cases where there’s been some policy changes or tweet.”

–With assistance from Surya Mattu, Mathieu Benhamou, Jade Khatib, Cedric Sam and Geoffrey Morgan.

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