Tag: stock market

Nancy Pelosi Disclosed a Multi-Million Dollar AI Investment Just Weeks Before the Stock Blew Up

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed a multimillion-dollar investment last month in an artificial intelligence company whose stocks exploded in value soon after.

Pelosi’s husband Paul invested in Bloom Energy, a California-based company that provides fuel-cell technology and power systems aimed at meeting the enormous electricity demands of AI data centers.

According to a financial transaction report Pelosi signed Aug. 21, her household made several Bloom Energy purchases in late July.

The transactions included 10,000 shares purchased July 24, along with 100 call options, according to reporting from the New York Post. Another 5,000 shares and 100 additional call options were purchased July 28.

The disclosed value ranges put the combined transactions at a minimum of roughly $3 million, although the actual amount could have been as much as $12 million, because congressional financial disclosure forms use broad dollar ranges.

The July 24 purchases came after Bloom Energy’s stock had suffered a significant decline.

Then came July 28.

That was the same day Bloom Energy reported extremely strong earnings, with annual revenue growth of 165 percent, according to the Post.

Bloom Energy’s stock subsequently took off.

Then, on Sept. 4, another major development arrived: Bloom Energy was announced as a new addition to the S&P 500.

The company is scheduled to join the benchmark index Sept. 21, alongside Everpure and Illumina.

Bloom Energy shares surged following the announcement, with the stock gaining nearly 40 percent over a five-day period, according to the Post.

By Tuesday, Bloom Energy shares were trading around $282.50, compared with $184.89 on July 24, the day of the first Pelosi household purchase.

That’s a striking move in a matter of weeks.

And it makes the timing of the disclosure noteworthy.

Pelosi’s office has said the former speaker does not own stocks and had no knowledge of or subsequent involvement in the transactions.

The trades were made by her husband and reported through the congressional disclosure system as transactions involving a spouse.

In an article about the transactions, financial writer Rich Duprey of 24/7 Wall Street  dubbed Pelosi “the queen of capital gains.”

“Pelosi’s trading record in Congress has consistently outpaced the S&P 500 and even Warren Buffett over comparable stretches, fueling suspicion that lawmakers with committee-level oversight enjoy an informational edge,” Duprey observed.

The New York Post said Pelosi “has faced heated blowback for her family’s trading activity — racking up a 65% return on her portfolio in 2023 while her venture capitalist husband made $38 million worth of stock trades in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration.”

Duprey noted that multiple bills to ban stock trading by members of Congress have been introduced, but they’ve all stalled.

The Democratic former House Speaker’s trades have been so notable that in 2023, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced one such bill that he dubbed the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act – or the PELOSI Act.

Hawley later met with Democrats and agreed to change the name of the bill to the HONEST Act — Halting Ownership and Non-Ethical Stock Transactions — which allowed enough Democratic support to advance the bill out of committee in July 2025.

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Amazon Shares Tumble Amid News Of FTC ‘Advertiser Deception’ Lawsuit

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJ reports, citing agency officials. 

According to the report:

The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.

The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ

Amazon’s digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet’s Google and Meta – earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report – which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back. 

Shares shot sharply lower on the news.

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U.S. Military Veterans Appeal Directly to Trump to Help Uncover the MMTLP Financial Scandal

After Years of Regulatory Stonewalling, Veterans Are Taking Their Fight Straight to Their Commander in Chief

American military veterans caught in the unresolved MMTLP financial debacle are taking their fight directly to President Donald Trump.

MMTLP (Meta Materials Class A Preferred Stock) is a controversial security that was abruptly frozen by FINRA in December 2022, leaving thousands of retail investors unable to trade or exit their positions.

After more than three years of unanswered questions, regulatory roadblocks, and congressional inaction, affected veterans say they have exhausted the normal chain of command.

Now they are going to the top.

The President of the United States.

For these veterans, this is no longer simply a story about a stock ticker.

It is about trust.

It is about accountability.

And it is about whether the federal agencies responsible for protecting American investors are willing to show the public what really happened.

VETERANS FOLLOWED THE CHAIN OF COMMAND

Military veterans understand the chain of command.

When something goes wrong, you document it.

You report it.

You move it up the chain.

That is exactly what veterans inside the MMTLP community say they have done.

They contacted state securities regulators, Attorneys General, Congress and the SEC, and filed Freedom of Information Act requests. They asked for investigations, meetings and the records.

And after more than three years, they still do not believe they have received a full accounting of what happened.

The consequences have been real.

Veteran advocates say members of the broader MMTLP community have lost homes, retirement savings and marriages. They also report suicides among affected investors.

For veterans watching their fellow service members suffer, enough is enough.

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Trump Has Made Up to $15M in Oil and Gas Stock Rise Spurred in Part by Iran War

President Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war on Iran has helped inject millions of dollars into his personal wealth while saddling everyday Americans with a $72 billion bill, a new report reveals.

Amid the war, oil and gas companies’ stocks have skyrocketed in value as companies report staggering earnings; ExxonMobil recently reported its profits doubling year-over-year, while Chevron’s net income has increased nearly 400 percent as a result of the disruptions to the global oil market. In all, oil and gas companies reported $125 billion in profits in the first half of 2026, with a corresponding jump in stock value across the fossil fuel industry.

As a result of that rise, Trump may have profited as much as $15.5 million, and netted at least $4.6 million, from his oil and gas holdings this year, Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found in a report this week. In all, his oil and gas holdings went from a maximum value of $45.5 million to as much as $61 million.

The analysis was based on stocks that Trump held at the end of 2025, including Exxon, Chevron, and seven other oil and gas companies. His profits may be even higher than the report suggests, as Trump bought additional oil and gas stocks in the first three months of 2026 worth up to $3.6 million. These were bought in a period when the U.S. seized control of Venezuela’s oil profits and launched a war on Iran that has sent oil prices sky-high.

Meanwhile, the rise in energy prices has cost Americans an additional $71.5 billion in gas prices at the pump, the Democrats found, or an average of over $600 a household. That’s before taking into account the hike in prices for things like groceries and other associated costs like increased mortgage rates caused by the war.

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Ro-lling in Dough: Khanna’s Personal Money Machine Kicked Into Overdrive in 2025, Trading $165 Million at Breakneck Pace, New Disclosures Show

Centimillionaire Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) seized on a banner year for the U.S. stock market in 2025, with the trusts owned by his wife and children trading at a breakneck pace all year. All told, Khanna, who estimated he was worth no more than $78 million when he entered Congress in 2017, now estimates he’s worth as much as $167 million.

Khanna and his family could actually be worth far more. He reported the value of 11 of his family’s assets as being worth more than $1 million with no disclosed ceiling, exemplifying how America’s ultra-rich families manage their money in such a way that congressional reporting requirements often fail to pierce the veil.

The left-wing California congressman—who posted a video on Wednesday saying “people are upset about the cost of living”—filed his 2025 financial disclosure late last week showing his family’s trusts made a staggering 5,402 trades during 244 of the 251 active trading days in 2025, a year in which the S&P 500 notched an above-average 17.9 percent return. In total, Khanna reported a total stock trading volume of up to $165.4 million, which included sales of upward of $70.6 million in stocks, options, ETFs, and hedge funds. It’s a substantial increase from his trading activity in 2024, when he logged 4,665 trades for a total trading volume of $137.2 million, including just shy of $50 million in securities sales.

Khanna filed the disclosure as he crisscrosses the nation advocating for “taxing the billionaires,” as he put it in his Wednesday video. In California—where Khanna represents the country’s wealthiest congressional district—the congressman is backing a statewide ballot initiative to impose a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires.

Data compiled by the website Rokhanna.Money, which recently digitized the nearly 150 analogue financial disclosure filings Khanna has filed since taking office, lay out the staggering increases in the nine years since Khanna entered Congress on a salary of $174,000. That year, Khanna’s reported net worth ranged between $29 million and $78 million. By the end of 2025, that figure was eclipsed, reaching somewhere between $69 million and $167 million.

Almost all of Khanna’s wealth comes from his in-laws in Ohio who made a fortune in auto parts. The Khanna fortune sits in trusts controlled by Khanna’s father-in-law, Monte Ahuja, that benefit his wife and two children. The trusts include some so-called irrevocable trusts that could shield them from future inheritance taxes.

Khanna insists he has “zero say” and “zero knowledge” of the trades made in his family’s trusts, which he said were set up by Ahuja and are professionally managed. Khanna has criticized members of Congress who trade stocks while in office, claiming they are causing a “crisis of confidence right now in our democracy.”

Members of Congress report their assets in wide valuation ranges, making it impossible to determine Khanna’s exact net worth. At first glance, the numbers suggest Khanna’s net worth dropped in 2025. He reported that the value of his assets ranged from $99 million to $315 million in 2024, whereas in 2025 his assets clocked in at somewhere between $69 million and $167 million.

But 2025 marked another year of exemplary growth in the U.S. stock market, and the wide range of Khanna’s reported assets in both 2024 and 2025 leaves open the likely possibility that his family’s professionally managed fortune grew substantially during the year.

Khanna’s salary has been frozen at $174,000 for years (the House has not given its members a raise since 2008) and his wife, Ritu Ahuja Khanna, is not believed to have had a job beyond board memberships and volunteering for many years. But the Khannas earned up to $10.8 million in dividends and business distributions from their investments in 2025, according to the congressman’s latest disclosure. It’s a staggering amount of purely passive income, suggesting that the Khannas enjoy generational wealth.

The wealth Khanna has accumulated while in office has enabled him to live the sort of oligarchic lifestyle he denounces on the campaign trail. His two young children, for example, are the beneficiaries of trusts that own large ownership shares in three private golf clubs in Ohio where membership initiation fees run upward of $45,000, the Washington Free Beacon reported. As they have in previous years, those golf courses delivered upward of $2 million in unearned income for Khanna’s children in 2025, according to his financial disclosure. Khanna’s children also own a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm as well as investments in hedge funds that focus on distressed debt, of which Khanna has been critical.

Meanwhile, Khanna is in the process of selling his $6 million, 8,000-square-foot luxury Washington, D.C., home equipped with a four-story elevator and two laundry rooms with marble countertops as his family is set to move into an even larger, more expensive custom-built house a few miles away in Northern Virginia, the Free Beacon reported. Ahuja Khanna purchased a luxury Range Rover SUV in October 2024 for $190,000 (which exceeds Khanna’s entire annual salary). Ahuja Khanna alleged in a lawsuit filed in federal court within a year of purchasing the vehicle that it was a lemon. Court records show she settled with Jaguar Land Rover of North America for an undisclosed sum in October.

As his family prepares for their move to a $9 million house in Virginia, Khanna has been pushing hard for the California billionaires’ tax. Khanna proposed on Saturday that California billionaires who are cash poor should be allowed to pay their California wealth tax by pledging shares of their companies to the state government for a period of 10 years, at the end of which the government seizes control of the shares if the loan isn’t repaid in full.

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Raskin Launches Probe of Scheme to Sell Insider Access to Trump Truth Social Posts

“Are you helping the president sell people advance access to market-moving information?”

That’s the opening line of a Thursday letter that US House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent to Kevin McGurn, interim CEO of President Donald Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) Corp.

TMTG runs Trump’s Truth Social platform and earlier this month announced plans to launch “Truth API” by August 1. API, or application programming interface, lets software applications talk to each other. Critics have warned that the new endeavor will give Wall Street firms faster access to posts by the president and other top accounts.

“Trump Media’s target market for buyers of this service is ‘high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms,’ which would each pay a
handsome $100,000 monthly subscription fee,” Raskin wrote. “Nearly half of each fee would go directly into the pocket of Donald Trump, who owns roughly 41% of the company’s shares through a trust that he continues to control.”

“Put another way, Trump Media will soon be selling early access to President Trump’s so-called ‘Truth’ missives to the most sophisticated investment firms in the world,” he stressed. “This insider-information scheme will enable Wall Street to profit from the president’s frequent market-moving posts on major businesses and cash in on swings in stock prices caused by the president’s buying and selling (or pumping and dumping, if you prefer) of publicly traded stocks to unwitting retail investors.”

As Investopedia pointed out Thursday: “In recent months Trump has posted about new developments in the Iran War, which is particularly important for buyers and sellers of futures contracts who are trying to ascertain where oil prices are headed. Over the past year, he has also posted about tariff policy, government investments in publicly traded companies, and other corporate news developments.”

Additionally, as Raskin highlighted, “Trump has promoted over 20 companies on his Truth Social account shortly after purchasing the companies’ stocks, including government contractors where the Trump administration exerted substantial ability to move markets in those companies’ favor. Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has posted a staggering 200% investment return since his father’s return to the White House, with the president recently admitting that his oldest sons are coventurers in his corruption.”

Once the new service is up and running, “whenever President Trump uses Truth Social to announce that a ceasefire is imminent, or prematurely leaks US jobs data, his customers will now be able to front-run the market using their privileged access to his social media posts, leaving retail investors, pension plans, and retirement accounts irreparably disadvantaged,” he warned. “This is precisely the type of harm that federal securities laws are designed to prevent.”

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House approves long-awaited stock trading ‘ban’ — here’s who the largest traders are

The House passed a sweeping set of restrictions on stock trades by lawmakers and their spouses that was paired with a voter ID provision that scared off many Democrats. 

The “Stop Insider Trading Act” cleared the House 232 to 198, with the full support of Republicans and 13 Democrats on board.

This includes Reps. Kathy Castor of Florida, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Susie Lee of Nevada, Jared Moskowitz of Florida, Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Darren Soto of Florida, and Derek Tran of California.

Complicating things for Democrats was the voter ID provision in the bill, which would’ve required photo identification to cast a ballot. 

Given that dynamic, there appears to be little appetite for the “Stop Insider Trading Act” in its current form in the Senate, which is subject to the 60-vote filibuster.

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Report: Trump Sons Build Defense Portfolio as Pentagon Billions Flow

President Donald Trump’s sons have built a broad portfolio of defense technology investments as their father’s administration directs more money toward drones, robotics, artificial intelligence, and other new weapons systems.

Funds linked to Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump have invested in at least 15 companies seeking business from the Pentagon and other federal agencies, according to a Washington Post analysis. Most of the investments came after Trump won reelection.

Since the sons invested, says the report,

The companies have collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options. Some have gained coveted spots on shortlists of preapproved contractors that can bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.

The explosion of the family’s financial wealth does not stop with the sons. A disclosure filed in 2026 showed that Trump himself reported at least $2.2 billion in income for 2025, up from about $600 million the previous year. That works out to roughly $6 million per day. His accounts also made thousands of securities trades across the economy, including investments in defense companies and other industries heavily regulated by, or dependent on, federal policy.

The Money Trail

The Trump sons’ investments reportedly flow mainly through two firms.

Donald Trump, Jr. joined venture-capital firm 1789 Capital as a partner within days of his father’s 2024 election victory. The firm promotes what its partners call “patriotic capitalism.” It invested in 11 of the 15 defense, robotics, and AI companies identified by The Post.

Meanwhile, Eric Trump has invested primarily through American Ventures. The firm operates through Dominari Holdings, a small investment bank based in Trump Tower. Eric Trump told the outlet that he was “one of several passive investors.”

Neither brother holds a government position. Neither had notable experience in defense technology before the investment drive began. Both remain executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization.

The Companies

The companies that the Trump-linked firms invested in range from industry giants to little-known startups.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX accounted for about $2.1 billion in direct federal business after the investment and another $1.2 billion in potential commitments, according to The Post. Musk was also Trump’s largest financial backer in 2024. He spent nearly $300 million supporting Trump and other Republicans.

SpaceX was already deeply dependent on Washington. As of February 2025, it reportedly held about $22 billion in government contracts, including roughly $15 billion from NASA.

Its military role has since expanded sharply. This May, SpaceX won a $4.16 billion Space Force contract for satellites designed to track and target airborne threats. Days earlier, it secured another $2.29 billion to build a military satellite communications network.

Those systems could form important parts of Trump’s controversial Golden Dome missile shield. SpaceX was previously identified as a leading contender for the program, alongside Anduril and Palantir (all run by Trump’s mega donors).

Anduril ranked second in The Post’s tally. It accounted for about $1 billion in direct government business and another $122.9 million in potential work. The company builds autonomous drones, surveillance systems, missiles, and counter-drone technology.

Together, SpaceX and Anduril accounted for 97 percent of the direct federal money identified by The Post.

The remaining investments covered automated weapons factories, rare earth magnets, quantum computing, humanoid robots, drones, rocket fuel, and targeting software. Hadrian and Vulcan Elements secured the largest potential commitments among the smaller firms. Other companies included Databricks, Foundation Future Industries, Unusual Machines, Firehawk Aerospace, Perplexity AI, PsiQuantum, and Aeon Industrial.

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Elon Musk Threatens Legal Action Against Ro Khanna After Congressman’s Outrageous Lie

Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X, has had it.

According to the New York Post, in a recent appearance on the leftist “I’ve Had It” podcast with insufferable host Jennifer Welch, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California insisted that Musk “needs to answer” for the “4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID” while Musk ran President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, in early 2025.

“Time to sue this liar,” Musk wrote Tuesday on X.

But Musk, who recently became the world’s first trillionaire, did not stop at the threat of a lawsuit. In fact, he made Khanna’s name synonymous with congressional stock trading.

“The standard applied by DOGE was very simple and easy: Provide contact information for the recipients of aid, so that we can confirm it is not fraudulent. The reality is that money was being sent to corrupt politicians under the guise of aid! Liars and stock insider traders like Ro the Robber should be in prison!!” Musk wrote.

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Andrew Left faces 20 years in prison — but having a correct opinion about a stock shouldn’t be a crime

This past Tuesday afternoon, I rang up Andrew Left, the high-profile short seller long known for meticulously documenting allegations of alleged corporate malfeasance and placing bets against companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Shopify and Chinese real estate giant Evergrande.

“Hey Charlie, I’m at the airport,” Left said as he picked up. “I’m sitting down, having a vodka.”

Given what had transpired just hours earlier, it wasn’t hard to understand the sitting-down-having-a-vodka part. Late Monday night, after a two-week trial, Left was convicted in Los Angeles federal court of 13 counts of securities fraud.

Prosecutors alleged Left circulated his research on social media and financial TV to move a bunch of stocks and make a ton of money. That constituted market manipulation, they said, and got a jury to agree with them.

It sounds to me like what Wall Street does every day — people who “talk their book” — not to mention all the retail trolls you see on X trying to gin up interest in speculative stuff that loses money. Even so, Left now faces 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in ­August.

Truth be told, there’s something unsettling in what Left admits he did: Purposely pushing stock prices around to make a quick buck. Big firms have strict rules around trading off research, placing stocks on so-called restricted lists. Reporters like myself don’t buy individual stocks out of fear our reporting will get us jammed up because we can move prices.

Yes, the trading may look fishy, and this type of trading around ­research reports and public comments has been a legal gray area. Purposely moving stocks can be construed as stock manipulation. Fishy, though, isn’t something that’s supposed to land you in prison for 20 years.

Try telling that to a jury — as Left’s lawyers did. In one day of trading, Left could make more than most of those people earned in a lifetime. It didn’t help that Left made his bones as a short seller. Making money from pushing stocks down in value just doesn’t sit well with most people, even if it means exposing various abuses and is necessary for markets to function properly.

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