Suspicious Trading Spikes Before Trump Post Trigger Insider Trading Concerns

Futures for oil and stocks worth billions of dollars changed hands just 15 minutes before a social media post from President Donald Trump sent crude prices tumbling and equities soaring. The precision of the timing has rattled financial markets and drawn a chorus of demands for a federal investigation.

In the 15 minutes before the announcement, trading spiked as 6,200 Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate oil contracts with a notional value of $580 million were exchanged, according to Bloomberg data. "Trading volumes for Brent and WTI leapt at the same time, 27 seconds before 6:50 a.m.," the Financial Times reported. The average for the same time period over the previous five trading days was about 700 lots, or 700,000 barrels.

The trades all occurred early on Monday before the markets opened in the U.S., and Trump announced on his Truth Social platform at 7:04 a.m. that he was going to delay threatened attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure after "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS" with Tehran. The message amounted to a sudden shift from Trump's post on Saturday that threatened to "obliterate" Iran's power plants unless it reopened the Strait of Hormuz to ship traffic. Trump's announcement caused oil prices to tumble and the Dow Jones Industrial Average to surge more than 1,000 points.

Trading platform Unusual Whales put even larger figures on the pre-announcement activity. Responding to a report that $1.5 billion worth of S&P 500 futures was purchased just five minutes before Trump's Monday announcement, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked: "Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?" "This is corruption," the senator wrote. "Mind-blowing corruption."

Observers said this kind of activity was highly unusual because it happened before the market opened on Monday and on a day without an anticipated news hook, such as the release of critical U.S. economic data or a company earnings call. The trading "was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions," Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in a March 24 blog post. He added that "the story would be baffling, except that there's an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits."

Spikes also appeared in stock futures. Spikes were also seen on other futures markets like the DAX Index Futures and Euro Stoxx 50 Index and across the Nasdaq and Russell 2000 indexes, according to Bloomberg. On the prediction market Polymarket, anomalous ceasefire bets were placed ahead of Trump's post, with bets totaling $70,000 made by eight users on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire. Researcher Ben Yorke said the accounts, which are anonymous, "definitely" look like "someone with some degree of inside info."

"The massive spike in volume of trades right before that post is certainly enough to raise eyebrows, and I think to launch an investigation into what was behind that," said Stephen Piepgrass, a partner who specializes in futures trading at the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke. Ben Schiffrin, director of securities policy at financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, called the timing of the oil futures trades "suspicious." "The innocuous explanation is that the traders just happened to trade right before the announcement of material information," he said. "The more problematic explanation is that they knew about the announcement before they placed the trades."

Independent commodities trader Peter Brandt, who has traded for five decades, told Al Jazeera he found the timing suspicious, noting that the trades were nevertheless legal because there is no law in the U.S. against "this type of insider trading" of futures contracts for oil and the S&P 500.

The Trump administration has systematically dismantled much of the machinery designed to catch insider trading and white-collar fraud. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, was reduced from 36 lawyers to two last year, according to NOTUS, and stripped of authority to file new cases. Reuters, citing three anonymous officials, reported that the SEC's top enforcement official resigned last week after agency leaders blocked her from aggressively pursuing cases touching Trump's circle.

Insider trading, when individuals or firms trade on material information that isn't publicly available, is illegal because it undermines market integrity and investor confidence. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures markets, did not immediately return requests for comment. White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the White House "does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge." Krugman argued that insider trading on national security decisions is illegal for reasons beyond unfairness: it presents a strategic vulnerability, since trading on classified information effectively broadcasts government plans to foreign adversaries. He also raised an unsettling question about whether the possibility of insider profits may be influencing the policy decisions themselves. "Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest?" he wrote.