The president has filed a trade report every 40 days for a year. None of them can be read by a computer.

We built a tracker this week for the stock trades disclosed by the president and White House staff, the same way we already track trades disclosed by members of Congress. It did not work, and the reason it did not work is worth more than the tracker would have been.

The filings exist. They are published. They are also, in the most literal sense available, unreadable.

What we found

The White House publishes financial disclosures on a single page. We scraped all of it. It holds 365 documents, of which 80 are periodic transaction reports, the form an official has to file within 30 days of a trade. 17 of those are the president's, across 10 distinct filing dates.

Those ten dates run from 12 August 2025 to 12 August 2026. That is exactly 365 days, averaging one filing every 40.6 days. Since a transaction report is triggered by trading and is due within a month of it, a filing roughly every six weeks for a year describes continuous activity rather than an occasional rebalance. 23 other executive branch officials filed transaction reports over the same period.

So the disclosure requirement is being met. Now try to read one.

Thirty-four pages, thirty-four bytes

We downloaded the most recent presidential filing, dated 12 August 2026. It is 34 pages and 31.9 MB. Extracting its text returns 34 bytes, and every one of those bytes is a form feed character marking the end of a page. There is no text in it at all. Not a name, not a ticker, not a date.

Inspecting the file shows why. Every page is a raster image, scanned at 144 or 200 dots per inch. The document is a stack of photographs of paper. A 31.9 MB file that contains no words is a strange object, and it is what compliance looks like when the output is an image.

We tried optical character recognition, because that is the obvious answer. Rendered at 300 dpi and run through Tesseract, a transaction page produced output like "a eee te tt ee eae". That is not a marginal result that careful tuning improves. At those scan resolutions, on dense financial tables, the text is simply not recoverable.

We stopped there, and we want to be plain about why. A misread digit in a dollar bracket is worse than no figure at all, because it looks exactly like a real one. Publishing OCR output from these scans would mean publishing numbers we could not stand behind, about a named person, on a finance site. So our executive branch tracker indexes every filing with its date and the original document, and stops short of the transactions inside.

Congress publishes the same form as data

This is the part that makes it a choice rather than a limitation.

Members of Congress disclose trades under the STOCK Act on a near-identical form, and the Clerk of the House publishes those filings with a text layer intact. From that same public source, our congressional tracker currently holds 2,500 individual trades from 83 members, each with a ticker, a transaction type, a date and a disclosed amount bracket. It updates itself every morning without a human touching it.

From 17 presidential filings covering a year of trading, the comparable number is zero.

Every congressional trade tracker you have ever seen, free or paid, exists because of that text layer. None of them cover the executive branch, and this is why. It is not that nobody thought of it.

What is actually inside the filings

We know some of it, because news organisations with staff who can read PDFs by eye have reported it. The June 2026 filing runs to more than 1,000 trades worth between $78.1 million and $263.1 million, with Berkshire Hathaway, Visa, Mastercard, Cintas and Home Depot bought and Meta sold. We went through those figures in our fact-check of the viral "three things broke at once" argument, where the trades were one of the claims that held up.

Note what that requires: a person, reading 34 pages of scanned tables, one filing at a time. It is done for the filings that make news and not for the rest. A form that can only be read by someone paid to read it is disclosed without being public in any useful sense.

The same pattern shows up in the crypto holdings. The 2025 disclosure, released on 30 June 2026, reports bitcoin held by CIC Digital LLC in cold storage at over $50 million, the form's highest band, with no wallet address given. Published totals for that filing ranged from over $580 million to $1.4 billion depending on the outlet, because the form reports bands rather than figures. We put the line items, and the addresses the companies did publish themselves, on our crypto tracker.

The fix is not a law

Nothing here requires new legislation, a new agency or a new form. The obligation already exists, the filings are already public, and the government already demonstrates the solution in the other branch.

• Publish the filing as text. These forms are completed electronically. Exporting a searchable PDF instead of scanning a printout is a setting, not a policy.
• Or publish the underlying data. The House does. The fields are structured already: filer, date, asset, transaction type, amount bracket.
• Until then, judge the transparency by the format. A disclosure regime that produces 31.9 MB of photographs is meeting its letter. Whether it is meeting its purpose is a question you can now answer by opening one of the files.

Our index of every filing is at /executive-trades, rebuilt daily. If the format ever changes, we will parse them the same day, and this article becomes obsolete. We would prefer that.

Filing counts, dates and documents scraped from the White House disclosures page on 24 September 2026. File measurements taken directly from the presidential transaction report dated 12 August 2026 using pdftotext, pdfinfo and pdfimages; OCR attempted with Tesseract at 300 dpi. Congressional trade counts from our own dataset, built from the Clerk of the House public disclosure filings. Nothing here is investment advice.