Lawmakers Traded Stocks Heavily as Trump Rolled Out ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs
Buying and selling of stocks spur new push to further restrict lawmakers’ market activities
Share
Trades reported by House lawmakers or their families
1,865
1,500
1,000
500
0
Jan. 2024
April ’24
July ’24
Oct. ’24
Jan. 2025
April ’25
WASHINGTON—As markets tanked in the wake of President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April, members of Congress and their families made hundreds of stock trades, shining a spotlight on a controversial practice that some lawmakers have pushed to ban.
From April 2, when Trump launched sweeping tariffs, to April 8, the day before he paused many of them, more than a dozen House lawmakers and their family members made more than 700 stock trades, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of disclosure filings. Top stocks purchased in that “Liberation Week” period, by the number of trades listed in the disclosures, included MKS Instruments and JPMorgan Chase, while the most sold stocks included Honeywell International and Visa.
The most common stocks reported in ‘Liberation Week’ filings
SALES
PURCHASES
Honeywell
MKS Instruments
Accenture
Amazon
Visa
Global Payments
Apple
Target
Abbott Labs
Capital One
RTX
Caterpillar
Okta
Exxon Mobil
Bank of America
JP Morgan Chase
Broadcom
Microsoft
Cisco Systems
Nvidia
Mondelez Intl.
Tesla
UnitedHealth
0
5
10
0
5
10
15
Note: Lawmakers can group multiple purchases of the same stock in a disclosure.
Source: WSJ analysis of federal disclosure data
Two lawmakers who have called for stock-trading bans in the past—Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Rob Bresnahan (R., Pa.)—reported the most transactions by themselves or family members, the analysis found.
The trading took place during one of the wildest stretches for global financial markets of the past decade. The S&P 500 tanked more than 4.5% for two consecutive sessions shortly after Liberation Day and recorded the biggest fall since the March 2020 market crash. More than $6 trillion in market value vanished.
Index performance since April 2
15%
Liberation Week
Nasdaq Composite
10
S&P 500
5
0
−5
−10
−15
April
May
June
Source: FactSet
The upswing after Trump announced his 90-day pause was dramatic, too. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite shot up 12% in a single session on April 9, its best day in 24 years. Stocks have largely kept rising since—staging a U-turn that has helped major indexes recoup April losses.
Broader trading activity surged in early April when Trump put up an economic wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Trading volumes on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq surged to some of the highest levels in records going back to 2007. House lawmakers and their families logged more trades in April than any other month in the past year, the Journal found.
Disclosure rules only require members to report wide ranges of transaction values, not specific amounts or the price. For most members who both bought and sold, that makes it impossible to tell whether their overall trading activity that week made or lost money. For instance, a typical purchase disclosure would say a member bought between $1,001 and $15,000 of a stock on a given day, leaving the exact size of the investment and the price paid unknown.
Stock-trading crackdown weighed
Congress has considered various proposals to ban lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks, instead requiring them to move investment money into mutual funds or put their portfolios in the hands of a financial manager who controls investments through a blind trust.
Lawmakers passed a law in 2012 prohibiting trading on insider information and mandating disclosure. Lawmakers rekindled discussions about trading restrictions in the wake of the market volatility influenced by Trump’s trade policies.
“This whole episode is a reminder that the opportunity for insider trading by members of Congress is very real, very toxic and needs to be eliminated,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner (D., R.I.), who is leading negotiations on a bipartisan bill that would further restrict trading.
A small group of House lawmakers including Magaziner and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.), along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Chip Roy (R., Texas) and others, are completing negotiations on a new bill that they say amounts to the first realistic shot at stock trading-based ethics reform in more than a decade.
Most prolific traders
The most active traders, as measured by the number of trades, during the week following Liberation Day were Khanna and Bresnahan, as well as Reps. Jefferson Shreve (R., Ind.), Julie Johnson (D., Texas) and Michael McCaul (R., Texas). Lawmakers are required to make filings showing trading by the lawmakers as well as close family members.
Representatives who reported the most trades during ‘Liberation Week’
Disclosed sale
Purchase
Ro Khanna
Rob Bresnahan
Jefferson Shreve
Julie Johnson
Michael McCaul
Marjorie Taylor Greene
0
100
200
300
Source: WSJ analysis of federal disclosure data
Khanna’s filings show sales of more than 200 shares and options, and the purchase of more than 110 securities. The trades were made by advisers who manage trusts for his wife and children, he said.
The pace of trading activity in Khanna’s family trusts during the tariff-induced market swing is consistent with previous weeks. In an interview, Khanna said that a financial adviser certifies that the trusts’ securities aren’t concentrated in any industry sector, conforming to restrictions for federal workers. Factoring in sold securities and the performance of subsequent purchases, the trusts have lost value since April 2, according to a representative from Khanna’s office.
“The diversified nature [of the trusts] is what we were told eliminates conflicts because it’s so broad-based,” he said. He said he is likely to support whatever stock-trading restrictions that the bipartisan group recommends.
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A spokeswoman for Bresnahan said his trades were made by an outside financial adviser and executed without his knowledge. A spokeswoman for Shreve said an outside financial adviser made the trades without his knowledge as part of a charitable trust whose profits must go to charity once it matures in seven years. Shreve can withdraw up to 5% of the trust’s assets annually, she added. He is in the process of moving his investments into a blind trust, she said.
Johnson said the trades were made by a financial adviser and that she is in the process of selling off individual stocks to reinvest in mutual funds and ETFs.
Elliot Berke, an attorney for McCaul, said in a statement that a third-party manager employed by his wife made the trades and the lawmaker didn’t have advanced knowledge of the activity.
Winners and losers
Other members took clearer positions on the market. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) and Jared Moskowitz (D., Fla.) mostly bought stocks in early April and were in a position to profit as a result, according to the analysis.
In the days after Trump announced the tariffs, Greene bought at least $28,000 of stocks in well-known companies such as FedEx, Amazon.com, Lululemon Athletica and Palantir Technologies. The purchases occurred over several days totaling 28 transactions. She only made one sale transaction, unloading at least $50,000 in U.S. Treasury bills the day before Trump’s delay announcement.
Greene has faced public scrutiny for her purchases, which were disclosed soon after the transactions occurred. In response, Greene has said her trades are managed by an outside financial adviser and all of her investments “are reported with full transparency.”
Two days before Trump’s tariff delay led stocks to surge, Moskowitz made 23 stock purchases of at least $1,000 each in companies such as Amazon, Nvidia and Visa. He made two sales of at least $1,000 during the same period. At least 20 of the stocks purchased have risen in value since then. Moskowitz also traded heavily in July, November, January and March.
A spokesman for Moskowitz said that the trades were executed by a financial manager who doesn’t involve the lawmaker in trading activity. He has signed a bill that would restrict trading.
Johnson, by contrast, appears to have placed money-losing bets that week. Through a joint trust, she made 56 stock sales two days before Trump’s rollback, missing the rebound. She didn’t make any purchases. The Journal found that 53 of those stocks later rose. Records show that she has been a frequent trader since she joined Congress in January with at least 262 transactions.
Price of Microsoft call options with a $320 strike, expiring June 2026
Gottheimer placed Microsoft trade on April 4
$18,000
Liberation Week
14,000
10,000
6,000
March
April
May
Note: Price reflects one contract, representing 100 shares
Source: Option Research & Technology Services
Some lawmakers’ disclosures dabbled in riskier trades.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D., N.J.), a former Microsoft executive who is running for governor, has traded options tied to the technology behemoth since at least 2021 and jumped into the market turmoil. He tapped a call options trade tied to Microsoft while the stock swooned 3.6% on April 4.
These trades are much riskier than stocks, and are often used to turbocharge exposure to the stock market, or hedge portfolios. One option contract gives the right to buy or sell 100 shares at a specific price, by a stated date.
For example, the Microsoft option that Gottheimer bought on April 4 changed hands for around $8,000 a contract for much of the day, according to analytics firm Option Research & Technology Services. As of late May, the prices would have roughly doubled.
A spokesman for Gottheimer said that an outside financial manager took control of his investments before he took office and that he is in the process of transferring his portfolio into a blind trust, which he believes all lawmakers should be required to use.
METHODOLOGY
The Journal downloaded more than 6,000 reports filed by House members to indicate sales, purchases or exchanges of securities. It then analyzed daily transactions, including stocks and options, and focused on the period between April 2 and April 8.
Many forms were digital, but several hundred were scanned images or handwritten entries. (Khanna’s office provided a year’s worth of filings because some of the publicly available documents were hard to read.) The Journal used an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm to extract data from those documents and checked a portion of them at random for accuracy. In some cases, sales or purchases were listed as “partial transactions” with no further information.
The rules don’t require lawmakers to list specific values of their transactions. So instead members indicate a range of values. They can range widely, from tens of thousands to millions of dollars.
The stock performance analysis was done by comparing the closing-share price on the transaction date to the close on June 6, 2025.
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