Source: Wall Street News
The easiest trading strategy on Wall Street over the past year might not have been AI or interest rate cuts, but rather five words: follow Trump. ( Related reading: Trump's Q1 stock trading activities revealed! These are the stocks he recently bought )
On social media, the investment account TheAIInvestor summarized it simply: one of the best-performing strategies over the past year was "trading with Trump." In more down-to-earth terms, it's roughly: Don't look at financial reports, look at who the White House praised today.
If we simplify it further, it becomes an industry chain: first it appears in the holdings, then it appears on the lips, and finally it appears on the candlestick chart.
Intel, Micron, and Dell have all seen their stock prices surge recently. One benefited from a government equity investment valuation revaluation, another was praised as "great" by the president, and the third was even specifically mentioned as "go buy a Dell, they're great."
The script is simple, but someone always pays for it.
Dell is the standard example of "presidential endorsement," while Micron is an accelerated version of "buy first, praise later."
On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.
Nine days later, standing on a stage in Georgia, he earnestly told the audience:
Go buy a Dell computer, they're great.
He then went on to praise the Dell family again in a video on the White House YouTube channel, casually mentioning that "they've invested a lot of money"—the implication being, well, you know what that means.
Dell shares surged 38% in after-hours trading overnight to a record high, after a steady upward trend prior to that.
Of course, Dell's stock price increase isn't solely based on rhetoric. The demand for AI infrastructure is real, as is the spending on enterprise servers and data centers. Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh maintained his "outperform" rating on Dell and raised his price target from $215 to $260, citing the expanding demand for AI infrastructure.
The Micron storyline has a more granular timeline. On March 25, Trump bought between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of Micron stock.
The following day, he called Fox News' "The Five," and his tone suddenly became heated:
I just met with the head of Micron, one of the hottest companies in the world.
On May 22, he added: Micron is "great".
Four days later, Micron's market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion for the first time. UBS promptly raised its target price from $535 to $1625, an increase of over 200%. The industry logic behind Micron's rise is the demand for high-bandwidth memory from AI servers, the expansion of data center capital expenditures, and the improved supply and demand in the storage industry.
Apple and Thermo Fisher both acted out this script.
Intel: If rhetoric isn't enough, finances will make up for it.
Dell and Micron represent a cross between personal holdings and public statements, while Intel is a more advanced version: not only is it endorsed by the president, but policy funds are also directly involved.
Materials show that the US government's equity investment has driven Intel's stock price up by about 200% this year. The White House stated on May 18 that the government's stake, acquired for $8.9 billion, is now worth over $50 billion.
In other words, Intel's rise was not simply due to exaggerated hype, but rather it was brought into the spotlight by policy, industrial security, and state capital.
The significance of Intel's case lies in the fact that it expanded the so-called "Trump trade" from personal investment portfolios to the policy capital market.
Investors should look not only at what Trump bought and praised, but also at what the government plans to invest in, rescue, and support.
This makes trading very much a new era activity: reading financial reports while simultaneously reading presidential speeches; looking at orders while watching Treasury Department actions; staring at candlestick charts while simultaneously browsing TruthSocial.
3711 transactions: Was it machine buying or a stock market guru opening the market?
What really made this matter a hot topic was OGE's financial disclosure documents released on May 14.
The documents show that Trump made 3,711 securities transactions in the first quarter of 2026, with a total value between $220 million and $750 million.
3,711 transactions in one quarter, averaging more than 60 transactions per trading day.
If you think this is a busy national leader dealing with the Middle East situation while looking at stock charts in the Oval Office, then you may not be very familiar with the term "direct indexation".
Samir Vasavada, co-founder of investment platform Vise, pointed out that the stocks in the disclosure documents overlap with the Russell 3000 index constituents by about 90%, which is a typical characteristic of the "direct indexing" strategy—not buying index funds, but directly holding constituent stocks, and then reaping tax losses through systematic trading.
The logic is as follows: when a stock falls, the system automatically sells to lock in the loss, then buys similar stocks in the same industry, resulting in a tax-deductible realized loss on the books. The overall position remains basically unchanged, but the number of transactions is systematically amplified.
March 23rd was the second busiest trading day in terms of disclosures, coinciding with the simultaneous adjustments to the constituent stocks of the S&P 500, 400, 600, and 100 indices, as well as the inclusion of new stocks in the FTSE Russell benchmark. On February 12th and March 18th, the S&P 500 fell by more than 1% on both days, triggering 155 and 124 sell orders respectively.
The timeline matches and the logic makes sense.
The White House's official explanation is the same: the president's investments are managed independently by a third-party financial institution and executed through "automated, model-driven portfolios and direct indexation strategies," with neither Trump himself, his family, nor his companies involved in investment decisions.
Therefore, the 3,711 transactions themselves may not be the problem. The problem lies in the fact that 625 of them were marked as "non-active orders".
625 “Non-Active Delegations”: Too Many Coincidences, They Don’t Seem Like Coincidences
"Unsolicited" means that the client initiates the engagement, rather than the broker suggesting it.
In other words, these 625 orders were not generated automatically by the system; they were placed by someone.
These 625 transactions were almost entirely concentrated in March, with the vast majority being buy orders, and a significant increase on the first trading day after the US attack on Iran. Compared to other systematic trades, they appear more ad hoc and random—or rather, more like someone having a specific desire to buy a specific asset at a specific time.
The key issue is that many timelines are too smooth.
On March 11, Trump visited Thermo Fisher's Ohio factory, calling it a "great company." On the same day, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock, noting that it was not actively ordered.
On the same day, he praised Apple CEO Tim Cook during a speech in Kentucky. That same day, he bought between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of Apple stock, also marked as "non-active orders." Throughout March, he cumulatively bought between $2 million and $7.2 million worth of Apple stock, including five non-active orders.
On March 25, Micron bought shares, marking them as non-active orders. The following day, he said on Fox Live that Micron was "one of the hottest companies."
On February 10, Dell made the purchase. Nine days later, he told the entire nation, "Go buy a Dell computer."
These transactions are not part of the system's automated logic.
The market begins trading for the "next roll call".
The market has already begun speculating on the next "lottery ticket".
OGE's first-quarter filings also disclosed holdings in companies such as ServiceNow, Adobe, and Texas Instruments. Investors are already speculating about who will be the next lucky company to receive public praise.
Oracle is a leading candidate. It has political and business connections with Larry Ellison and is also involved in the Stargate AI infrastructure project.
Broadcom fits the bill perfectly. With a valuation exceeding $2 trillion, the company supplies custom chips to US data centers, a crucial part of the government's technology agenda.
Motorola Solutions, on the other hand, takes a different approach: police radios, dispatch software, and public safety monitoring equipment, perfectly aligned with the narratives of law enforcement and border security.
On May 26, Trump also posted a message on TruthSocial specifically supporting the prediction market industry, demanding that the CFTC maintain "exclusive jurisdiction" over platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket.
