Methodology
This page documents — in full — where the data comes from, how it is extracted and validated, and the editorial rules that govern how it is presented. The methodology is public and versioned; material changes are recorded here.
What this is
Trump Stock Tracker is a civic-transparency project. It compiles the President’s securities transactions as disclosed under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 and the STOCK Act of 2012, and correlates them with his public statements and official government actions. It is a transparency tool — not financial advice, and not a legal determination of wrongdoing.
The OGE Form 278-T
Federal officials disclose securities transactions on OGE Form 278-T (Periodic Transaction Report), filed within 30 days of notification and no later than 45 days after the transaction. Each filing lists transactions with a description, a type (Purchase, Sale, Sale (Partial), or Exchange), a date, a late-notification flag, and an amount — reported as a statutory range, never an exact figure.
Amount bands
The form never reports a precise dollar amount. It uses these statutory value ranges. This site always displays the range; aggregate “estimated value” figures use band midpoints and are themselves shown as ranges.
| Band | Range |
|---|---|
| 1 | $1,001 – $15,000 |
| 2 | $15,001 – $50,000 |
| 3 | $50,001 – $100,000 |
| 4 | $100,001 – $250,000 |
| 5 | $250,001 – $500,000 |
| 6 | $500,001 – $1,000,000 |
| 7 | $1,000,001 – $5,000,000 |
| 8 | $5,000,001 – $25,000,000 |
| 9 | $25,000,001 – $50,000,000 |
| 10 | Over $50,000,000 |
Data sources
- Trades: the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) presidential disclosure system, and the White House disclosures pages. OGE is the source of record.
- Statements: the American Presidency Project and the federal Compilation of Presidential Documents (single-speaker official transcripts), plus Truth Social posts.
- Official actions: the Federal Register API (executive orders, proclamations, rules) and White House fact sheets, articles, and statements scraped from whitehouse.gov.
- Share prices: end-of-day price history from Stooq, used to chart each company and mark the President’s disclosed trades on the timeline.
Extraction & validation
The 278-T filings are scanned documents; some carry a poor embedded OCR text layer and the newest carry none at all. A content-anchored extractor locates each transaction by its recognizable amount band and date rather than by fragile column geometry. Every filing then passes a validation gate — page-count reconciliation, transaction-type and amount-band enum checks, and date sanity. Each filing receives a parse-confidence score; filings below threshold are withheld from the public view and held for human review rather than published unverified. Where a filing scores low, an LLM adjudicator re-reads the source PDF under a strict schema.
Timing correlations
Each trade is scored for timing correlation against contemporaneous statements and official actions using a transparent, multi-component model (temporal proximity, entity specificity, authority, directional consistency, trade magnitude, and corroboration). Every correlation displays its full component breakdown. The score is an analytical index, never a verdict.
Editorial discipline
This project publishes verifiable facts and transparently-scored correlations. It does not assert that any trade was illegal, nor that it used nonpublic information. No evidence presented here establishes that any trade used nonpublic information; correlation is not causation; lawful trading is lawful. Amount ranges are statutory bands, not exact figures. Transaction dates may precede filing dates by 30–45 days, and filings may be amended.
Permitted use
Disclosure data is used solely for news and transparency dissemination to the general public — the use expressly permitted under 5 U.S.C. § 13107(c). It is not used for credit-rating, solicitation, or any other commercial purpose.
Attribution
Project by Benjamin Life (@omniharmonic). Methodology version 1.1.