Just minutes before Donald Trump announced a temporary pause on strikes targeting Iran’s energy sites, billions of dollars starting flowing through the oil market.
Contracts for at least six million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude were sold at around 6.50am on Monday – roughly ten times the daily average.
At 7.05am, President Trump dropped a bombshell on global markets as he said the US wanted to negotiate with Iran.
Oil prices dropped sharply, around 14 percent in a matter of minutes, and money flowed into the pockets of the early traders.
It’s not the first time that outsize bets have rippled across the markets since Trump took office: everything from Bitcoin to stock‑index futures options have made traders buckets of cash, with prediction sites making profiteering even more accessible.
But the prospect that insider traders are potentially making money on highly classified secrets from the heart of the Oval Office during the Iran war poses a far more glaring security and ethical question.
Matt Saincome, CEO of Unusual Whales, a platform to detect anomalous trading activity, told the Daily Mail that the data leaves little room for doubt that regulators should investigate the trades.
‘I can say the data here demands an investigation,’ Saincome stated. ‘Regulators should explain to the public what happened here.’
‘I would love to be in the room when this trader explains what happened here. If the trader is never asked to explain, I would love to be in the room when the regulators are asked why the hell not.’
The suspicious timing does not necessarily mean the trades were illegal, Saincome noted.
No Trump administration official has been implicated in any wrongdoing.
‘All federal employees are subject to government ethics guidelines that prohibit the use of nonpublic information for financial benefit,’ White House Spokesman Kush Desai told the Daily Mail in a statement.
‘However, any implication that administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.’
Executive branch ethics regulations prohibit government employees from conduct or participating in gambling activity while on government owned or leased property, or while on duty for the government, according to a White House official.
Still, the massive scale of the trades make the concerns hard to dismiss.
Contracts for at least 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate oil were sold within minutes, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg – roughly ten times the daily average of around 700,000 barrels in the five days leading up to the Monday trades.
Billions of dollars worth of oil stocks and futures changed hands in those few minutes.
Now there are questions in financial circles about whether someone with access to the President’s thinking cashed out on the market-moving news.
‘President Trump can exert enormous influence over the stock market, and he has been very willing to use it,’ Christopher Kardatzke, Co-Founder Quiver Quantitative, a financial transparency firm, told the Daily Mail.
‘He also appears to be aware of the impact that his comments can have on the market, often waiting until it is closed to release information that might shock it.’
Kardatzke added: ‘There are undoubtedly individuals in and around DC who have advance knowledge of market-moving information, and we do our best to track whether any of them use that information to their personal advantage.’
Stephen Piepgrass, a regulatory investigation expert told the Daily Mail that the Monday morning trades had ‘unusual volume.’
Trump’s social media post announced a five-day stand down on striking Iran’s energy infrastructure on Monday due to ongoing negotiations with the country’s leadership. The news was well received, and oil prices dipped significantly on the development.
‘That’s the sort of thing that can prompt people to speculate about insider trading – people making those trades based on knowledge others don’t have,’ Piepgrass said. ‘Is it potentially even a decision maker who’s been making these trades, or someone closely tied to them?’
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Similar concerns exist for prediction market traders that profited off of well-timed, large bets on US operations in Venezuela.
‘What makes this even more potentially suspicious is all of the other futures and the all of the other futures trades that have been taking place in recent days, and a lot of those have been taking place on the predictive markets,’ Piepgrass stated.
‘We had trades around the Maduro being taken out in Venezuela. Then we had trades around the conflict in Israel and Palestine. And then we had additional trades around the action in Iran, and now this trade on oil, and it just starts to feel like a pattern.’
The Commodities Future Trading Commission, the body tasked with investigating such future trades, which also oversees prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, has just one-seventh the enforcement staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees suspicious stock trades.
The CFTC has yet to comment on the suspicious trades.
The commission did not respond to the Daily Mail’s inquiry about whether a probe into the oil futures trades has been opened.
If an investigation is opened, and the trail leads to classified information being misused, Piepgrass says the FBI, CIA or NSA could open parallel inquiries.
‘There are data points here that are suspicious… The fact that this trade was made only 15 minutes in advance of the tweet going out is really suggestive that maybe there’s some inside information here,’ Piepgrass told the Daily Mail.
‘This is certainly enough to get investigators looking into it – it is plenty to raise eyebrows.’
