President Donald Trump's independent investment team sold between $5,000,001 and $25,000,000 of Amazon and Microsoft stock in July, according to required ethics filings. The sales stand out from the team's roughly 28,700 trades since January 2025, raising questions about whether the move is simple profit-taking or a signal on stretched AI valuations.
Trump's independent, third-party investment team sold between $5,000,001 and $25,000,000 of Amazon and Microsoft stock each in July, according to required U.S. Office of Government Ethics filings. The two sales stood out among 1,156 new trades the team made that month.
The financial disclosures list approximately 28,700 trades since January 2025, reportedly driven by automated direct-indexing computer models that allow rapid-fire trading. Most of those trades fall well below $1 million, which makes the size of the Amazon and Microsoft sales notable.
Amazon and Microsoft anchor the AI trade
Amazon and Microsoft have positioned themselves as leaders in AI applications rather than AI hardware. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure were already the world's No. 1 and No. 2 cloud infrastructure platforms by spend before generative AI and large language model capabilities were layered on top, and sales growth for both segments has since accelerated.
AWS logged 37% sales growth in the June-ended quarter, its fastest revenue growth in 18 quarters. Azure's sales growth, meanwhile, jumped to 43% in Microsoft's fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30.
Why the team sold anyway
Profit-taking likely explains some of the selling, but perhaps not all of it. History shows that every game-changing technology since the internet's rise in the mid-1990s has navigated a bubble-bursting event, as investors tend to overestimate how fast a new technology gets adopted or optimized. Businesses, including Amazon and Microsoft, are likely still years away from optimizing AI to maximize sales and profits.
Stock market valuations have also climbed sharply during the AI build-out. Amazon and Microsoft are each cheaper than other "Magnificent Seven" stocks, but both would probably suffer if the broader market pulled back from current levels.
Source: The Motley Fool
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