$70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/70-million-in-60-seconds-how-insider-information-helped-someone-28x-their-money/

by pulisse • 1 year ago

809 405 1 year ago

data-and-politics.ghost.io

ojbyrne• 1 year ago

I imagine this is going to happen again (except 100x) when there’s a China “deal.”

hdevalence• 1 year ago

We don’t know who placed the trades. We don’t know what they knew.

Actually, “we”, collectively, do know, because the SEC maintains an “XKEYSCORE for equities” called CAT.

If there was interest, the government could know exactly who placed these trades. But the call (options) are coming from inside the house.

sebasv_• 1 year ago

What would determine whether the SEC will investigate for insider trading? I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.

klipt8• 1 year ago

SEC is a federal agency so falls under the Executive which is controlled by Trump. Trump will fire any SEC employee who investigates the "wrong" people and install a loyalist in their place.

pulisse2• 1 year ago

I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.

In the past month the SEC has stopped most enforcement actions involving crypto.

hurtuvac78• 1 year ago

The president nominates the SEC chair, and can fire him.

This explains how, written just before Trump assumed power:

While he can't force Gensler to step down as a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he can name a new interim SEC chair as soon as he's inaugurated on Jan. 20. He can also nominate a new commissioner to the Senate, which has to confirm the pick.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/07/heres-how-quickly...

And Gensler resigned as Chair as soon as Jan 20th:

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-29

daedrdev• 1 year ago

In this administration they will be fired for cases Trump doesnt like. Who would protect their independence, Congress? The house members will not oppose any trump policy unless the US is in a depression due to his action

tdb78932• 1 year ago

Who would be doing the shielding? The current US government has been operating under the assumption of an incredibly expansive executive power, even over "independent" agencies.

I'm not a legal expert at all but so far the most useful mental model has been to assume absolutely no one is shielded from executive power (including organizations and people entirely outside the federal government) unless the courts have delivered a final ruling on it.

dboreham6• 1 year ago

When the criminals get root access...

rco8786• 1 year ago

Why would you expect that?

hattmall• 1 year ago

Questionable if there is anything to investigate, definitionally you can't inside trade an index fund.

jibal• 1 year ago

"I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure."

Such an expectation was rational prior to 2025-01-20. Since then it's been completely counterfactual.

richardw• 1 year ago

You keep the receipts for about 4 years and you speak up one minute after the government changes. You get it done long before the following election.

eru23• 1 year ago

With a bit of luck, you only have to wait for 2 years, when Congress changes hands.

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

Assuming the President doesn't pardon you for all crimes committed from 2008 until 2030...

mullingitover2• 1 year ago

No economic system is functional without a bunch of compromises, and capitalism needs strong regulations as a check to keep it from turning absolutely rotten.

We're witnessing the removal of all of the guardrails, traffic signals, road maintenance crews. The highway patrols have been replaced by organized teams of highwaymen.

It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.

eru23• 1 year ago

It depends on what you mean by 'strong regulations'. Regulations that are on the books should be enforced as written. In that sense I agree. But it doesn't mean that we actually necessarily need all the regulations that are on the books to stay on the books.

Eg, it would be perfectly fine to make insider trading legal by law. (And in fact, the definition of insider trading in the US differs a lot from the one used in France. So there are lots of things that have long been legal in the US that would have been illegal in France, without the economy collapsing.)

I agree that random enforcement of some regulations but not others depending on the whim of the executive is less than ideal.

consumer4515• 1 year ago

I recently read someone's comment here stating that "trust is efficient."

What we are witnessing is the devolution of the USA from a high-trust to low-trust business environment. "Low-trust business environment" is the euphemism we have used to describe other countries, where corruption is rampant. This is so sad to watch.

astral_drama• 1 year ago

It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.

If they're getting away with it, they'll do it again. The tariffs were paused for 90 days. The plan is to run the same playbook in 90 days.

delusional• 1 year ago

It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.

Importantly, there's no guarantee it's actually going to get better. We like to pretend that human existence has some trajectory towards "justice" or "prosperity". I don't think that impulse does us justice.

Stalin/Lenin could have won. Hitler could have won, Napoleon could have conquered and held. It could just get worse.

Almondsetat3• 1 year ago

Capitalism actually thrives where there is only 1 regulation: total transparency. After all, if we go by the classic definition of free market competition we have customers who have perfect knowledge of every product and the products are very similar and etc. etc.

Who cares if someone at the WH does insider trading? In a transparent system people would be able to trace back every transaction and realize something is brewing and they could act accordingly.

jwilber2• 1 year ago

Maybe it's a friend of Trump. Maybe it's a friend of Pelosi. Might even be a member of Congress!

"Rules for thee not for me."

paulgb• 1 year ago

Is congress actually apprised of the tariff developments, or do they learn about them from twitter like the rest of us?

dtquad• 1 year ago

How would a "friend of Pelosi" know when Trump would post his "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" and "90 days pause" posts?

cft4• 1 year ago

from the house of representatives or the white house? and how do you know?

maxbond• 1 year ago

Is this really SEC's bailiwick? Aren't options commodities (and so regulated by CFTC)?

shawabawa3• 1 year ago

Options are not commodities

They're a derivative, so options of equities are equities and I guess options of commodities are commodities

manuelfcreis• 1 year ago

Neither! Options are derivatives, which are also regulated by the CFTC

dragonwriter3• 1 year ago

No, options are derivatives and are, in the US, generally regulated by the body regulating the underlying asset; stock/index options are regulated by the SEC, commodities options by the CFTC.

rvba• 1 year ago

The prosecutors dont need any spy tool to check who did the trade (at least officially). They can simply ask to receive the records / logs.

testing223214• 1 year ago

That same day after market close Trump directly told us it was insider trading AND who dun it.

He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

There is a difference between making 2.5 billion because you owned stocks and the market went up and making 2.5 billion because you bought just before the market went up and then you sold.

bhouston• 1 year ago

You are inferring too much from that comment. I think those people just had large stock holdings in general and were he market went up a lot that day.

more_corn• 1 year ago

Are you suggesting that the SEC won’t investigate this obvious insider trading because it came from someone in his inner circle? Big if true.

rschneid• 1 year ago

The consolidate audit trail regularly has millions of errors within a day... It's far from complete data; here's their latest report card:

https://catnmsplan.com/sites/default/files/2025-04/04.01.25-...

Also, CAT is run by CATNMS, LLC which was created in response to an SEC rule 613, however it is operated by the same consortium of SROs that it purports to provide oversight on...

All these layers of responsibility diffusion and a notable absence of penalties for failing to meet rule 613 guidelines mean that rule is little more than for show.

uptownfunk• 1 year ago

I mean in theory couldn’t anyone close to the news source transmit it somehow via an anonymous communication channel to someone else so they can make the trade. Even if there is an investigation they have to find the proof to make a conviction right?

dboreham6• 1 year ago

That's how prosecution of insider trading crime is done.

vasco• 1 year ago

You can worry about market manipulation, or you can buy GME shares, lock them in the Direct Registration System and wait. I just like the stock.

sorokod3• 1 year ago

kleptocracy

/klĕp-tŏk′rə-sē/ noun

A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.

testing223214• 1 year ago

A few years back the US labeled China a “state manipulator” of currency.

Surely it will only take a few more rounds of pump and dumping the entire US economy for basically every country to label the US the same, and move away from US bonds and the US dollar as reserve currency. It just won’t be stable enough with all these antics.

When it happens I just hope trump won’t use it as justification for war.

bdangubic• 1 year ago

didn’t you get the memo, Trump is the President of Peace. people voted for him because of this :)))

EasyMark12• 1 year ago

That seems pretty two faced given their own practices over the years.

recursive4• 1 year ago

No citations.

pulisse2• 1 year ago

It's an analysis of publicly available data.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

Do you also require medical examination to identify shit stuck to your shoe?

permalac2• 1 year ago

This is public knowledge. Google 'spy insider trading', and click news.

solardev2• 1 year ago

[flagged]

disqard• 1 year ago

...you forgot to mention her Emails!!!1

fragmede• 1 year ago

https://www.threads.net/@hillaryclinton/post/DHmE6l7xQnw

jxjnskkzxxhx3• 1 year ago

The media is largely at fault here, pretending that both sides are equal.

thih92• 1 year ago

The people are even more at fault, being fine with this.

roflyear2• 1 year ago

There is some kind of weird issue here, not sure what it is called, that where if the media were to blow this up everyone would say they are overreacting.

So it becomes a "seat at the table is better than no seat" thing where they won't ask Trump these questions.

refurb2• 1 year ago

Let's not play that game please.

We don't even know who made these trades.

If we look at actual trades by politicians who actually sit on committees with tradable information, we know the biggest culprits are on both sides of the aisle.

https://newrepublic.com/post/177806/members-congress-made-st...

thrance3• 1 year ago

For real, Watergate feels like a fever dream. Trump does 10x worse every single day and no one cares.

ananamouse• 1 year ago

Obama assassinated multiple US citizens without due process of law?

sdfjhdfn• 1 year ago

And did an about-face on whistleblowers. He, like his successors, have all been anathema to freedom. Class balkanization.

gitaarik• 1 year ago

What's wrong with a blowjob?

enraged_camel2• 1 year ago

Nothing. Clinton got impeached not for the blowjob (which was consensual), but for lying under oath about it, i.e. perjury.

notdarkyet4• 1 year ago

[flagged]

lm28469• 1 year ago

Hacker news is made of people usually smart people, and smart people tend to favor one side of the political spectrum more than the other

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe• 1 year ago

beige jacket

Had to look it up, thanks!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_contro...

epaga• 1 year ago

This unethical stuff is where Trump actually shows true “brilliance”.

His Truth Social post that day saying (quote) “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!” immediately gave any insider traders a perfect alibi.

AstroBen• 1 year ago

why are you assuming it was trumps idea

aetherspawn3• 1 year ago

The stock market needs to just be deleted. It’s the insider trading scam machine of the rich class.

The whole goal of the stock market is to come up with information that people don’t generally have (insider trading) either from research, or secret info, so you can dupe everyone else’s money.

random3• 1 year ago

Delete along with publicly traded companies, or what’s the plan?

miohtama4• 1 year ago

Socialism. Worked well in the past (:

aetherspawn3• 1 year ago

It makes sense to allow public investment in companies, but base it off (regulated) external valuation rather than real time supply/demand.

Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).

Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed. This is also less stressful for the individual investor — most people I know who trade stocks also check the stocks 10+ times per day and it occupies such a large area of their headspace.

hello_computer3• 1 year ago

The brilliant thing is that they have woven it deep into the retirement ponzi-schemes, so nothing short of a cataclysm will unwind it.

There is also the Machiavellian consideration of external threats. We need these corporations to make the tools of Ahriman. Without them, another country's corporations will make them first, and use them to subjugate us. People who believe in God (not just the Abrahamic one, but any good creator) prefer not to play this game, but most people are strict materialists, so they are locked into this equation.

aetherspawn3• 1 year ago

Sorry I don’t really understand the part about the tools of Ahriman, would you mind to explain?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 1 year ago

When they say stock market returns 7% on average, it's >7% for the insiders/manipulators and <7% for the regular Joe.

nramanand5• 1 year ago

A relevant aside: surely insider trading is happening all the time? There are so many daily market-shifting events involving so many privy parties that it seems inevitable to happen every few minutes (not defending the actions in the article).

How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading.

How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.

solardev2• 1 year ago

In the past, we liked to pretend this was illegal. Now we don't even bother with that.

eru23• 1 year ago

Insider trading in the US is more about misappropriating information that belong to a party you have fiduciary duties to, not so much about harm to the public.

For example, imagine you are working for Warren Buffet and you learn that he has quietly bought some stocks and next weeks he's going to announce that. Assume that this announcement will reliably make the stock trade up. If you trade on that information, that's insider trading by US laws.

However, now imagine that you are Warren Buffet. You just quietly bought some stock, and you plan to announce that fact next week. If you trade on that information about your intentions, that's not insider trading by US law: you are allowed to trade on your own private intentions and information.

Notice that from the point of view of the anonymous counter party trading with you on the stock exchange, both situations look exactly the same.

That's an illustration that insider trading law in the US is not supposed to protect the public. (At least not originally.) So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off.

Of course, IANAL applies. The above explanation is mostly paraphrased from Matt Levine's Money Stuff.

DeathArrow5• 1 year ago

Well if CEO X and his deputy Y pass me on the street and they are overly excited or overly depressed, and I overhear what they talk and I buy some options, does it mean I break the law?

miohtama4• 1 year ago

It has been estimated 25% of stock market trading is some sort of insider trading. However 1) it depends where you draw the line what's insider information and what not 2) not all of these trades all profitable.

Due to insider trading rules being problematic, sometimes more headache than benefit, the UK FCA is now allowing new stock market to launch where insider trading is legal.

LeafItAlone14• 1 year ago

How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission?

Do you actually have an answer to that? Or are you just throwing out an unanswerable question as some form of “gotcha”?

Now I’m actually curious. There aren’t _that_ many publicly traded companies; only about 4,000 according to Google. A little over 9,000 IPOs since 1980 [0]. The number of companies where the CEO being “out of commission” on such a short timescale would generate “rich” (to me, in this scenario, >$5 million) levels of ROI has to be pretty low up. Probably not even most of the Fortune 100. Then the number of doctors who have that info and are going to act on it is a smaller fraction. Then the three have to match (command that fits + ill CEO + trading physician). Do you think it’s over 10? 25?

0. https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPO-Statistics....

kulahan• 1 year ago

Never in a million years would I have guessed that there have only been 9000 IPOs in the last nearly half-century. Really drives home how many US businesses are privately owned.

DeathArrow5• 1 year ago

But not only the physicians know a CEO will be out of commission. And there are many more cases where a CEO will leave a company without being ill.

And there are much more situations that will influence stock prices than a company changing its CEO. Those situations can be both internal and external to a company.

So I think we potentially have thousands or tens of thousands of people who learn information that make them rich if they act quickly. And even that has a multiplying factor since those people have friends and family.

"Hey Bill, wanna make a quick buck? As soon as market opens buy XYZ. You don't know it from me and I didn't call you today."

nramanand5• 1 year ago

I agree with you that it's possibly unanswerable, which is more or less the point. The broader idea is that there are lots of obscure interactions like that one I made up.

You can switch up the doctor and CEO patient for anything else. Bankers, lenders, family friends, former professors ... An unbounded number of humans that can come into contact with useful info to trade on. What do we think are the magical constraints that prevent them from doing so? Corporate etiquette?

The ROI will obviously be a function of what information is passed. But I think that I'm more interested in understanding how often it happens rather than that any one case is "low ROI". It is interesting to consider whether it's the ROI threshold that should philosophically make/not make something insider trading.

nhkcode• 1 year ago

Maybe all the insider trading going on is part of why the chances for regular investors to beat the market are so slim.

jopsen• 1 year ago

I doubt it.. I suspect that most of us would trade just as poorly if we knew Q results ahead of the announcement :)

Because it maybe up a bit or down a bit, but that's all going to measured relative to assumptions the market has and those assumptions aren't public either.

dboreham6• 1 year ago

You seem to have discovered the crime of insider trading and conveniently ignored the fact that it's a crime.

LurkerAtTheGate• 1 year ago

How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.

Much of it is data analysis. My favorite examples of this are actual hacks - once foothold is established instead of encrypting & ransoming, the attacker just listens to the CEO/CFO. One hacked a law firm that handled some sizable mergers.

Personal tangent: Once had an opportunity to insider trade on a particular huge aerospace company. Playing a squad-based PvE game, matchmade into a team with 3 real-life friends at said company who chatted on in-game voice comms about their day, talking about court cases and senate hearings, and later panicked when they realized I could hear it all. They were nice guys, and I assured them that I wouldn't misuse what I overheard - I don't work in a relevant industry, and my investments do just fine without an illegal edge (plus I know Matt Levine's Laws of Insider Trading #1: Don't).

Quarrel2• 1 year ago

These sort of trades happy fairly regularly, before market breaking news in individual stock names.

Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)

The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.

w10-13• 1 year ago

These sort of trades happy fairly regularly

I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique before any market-shifting news event coming out of the government in recent decades. The "sort" of transaction is irrelevant except that it's risky and thus relatively low volume normally.

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique

It did not established that. If it was so unique, the market would have reacted to this trade (before the news).

Quarrel2• 1 year ago

It's unusual for it to happen in major indices.

I said it happens in individual stock cases, but very few people / places that control major market moving news leak - and when they do they investigate the hell out of it.

Imagine if this happened 20 minutes before Jerome Powell unexpectedly dropped interest rates?

svg73• 1 year ago

While I have no doubt that insider trading happens quite regularly, I would not jump to that conclusion here. IIRC the previous day, big Wall street names were advocating for a pause in tariffs . So a lot of people placed bets accordingly. Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.

eru23• 1 year ago

Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.

Why? A secretary or janitor or a intern could also be an insider. Or are they No True Scotsmen?

svg73• 1 year ago

Yes, in theory, anyone can be an insider. But folks up in the chain are much more likely to be "insiders with information". I should have probably said "very rich insiders" instead of "true insiders."

DeathArrow5• 1 year ago

Why? A secretary or janitor or a intern could also be an insider. Or are they No True Scotsmen?

I thought the article itself and comments here presume bad faith on behalf of the highest ranking officials.

TheAlchemist3• 1 year ago

2.5M on 0 day options is not small change at all, even for somewhat big players.

0 day - means it's a win big or loose 2.5M on a single day move.

ascorbic• 1 year ago

That was just one of many trades. The follow-up has deatils of many more https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...

DeathArrow5• 1 year ago

Also staking 2.5M is "small change" for true insiders.

Well, if it was insider trading, Trump and his billionaire friends wouldn't invest just 2.5 million. That's a meager sum for the very wealthy.

Maybe they've even done insider trading but in ways that weren't so obvious.

sorokod3• 1 year ago

Could a test run by "very rich insiders". To gauge the system's reaction before the next one, possibly a deal with China.

w10-13• 1 year ago

So a lot of people placed bets accordingly

But why not earlier in the day? Why this unique volume spike then? The one $2.5M is just a sample trade, part of a historic spike.

No one's jumping to conclusions, but it should trigger an investigation.

koolba3• 1 year ago

Has it even been confirmed that all the trades are the same entity? Or is it the usual momentum play?

lucaspm982• 1 year ago

Everyone is jumping to conclusions. The majority of comments on this thread are assuming this is at least someone with inside knowledge, and several are saying Trump or his administration are directly involved.

az226• 1 year ago

But these rumors were said and talked about several days. But no big options trade was made before the actual day of announcement. That’s why it’s telling.

torginus• 1 year ago

These are just the most shameless and/or retarded people. Insiders who bought quietly spread over the day before we'll never find out about

jmyeet• 1 year ago

What's surprising about all this is how quickly, easily and cheaply the republic was dismantled and how little opposition there was from people in power.

This culminated in Trump v. United States [1] where unelected partisans simply invented presidential immunity completely out of thin air. That means there are absolutely no possible legal repercussions for any of this. None. And even if there were, the agencies in charge of enforcing it have either been gutted or they've been subverted by putting a sycophantic lackey in charge.

This is the new kleptocracy we live in. Nobody is coming to save us. The supposed political opposition (ie the Democratic Party) is nothing more than feckless controlled opposition who are more interested in defending US imperialism than they are in winning elections.

Things are only going to get worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

kilroy123• 1 year ago

I agree no one is coming to save anything.

The only people that can save it are regular people standing up and taking action.

huijzer3• 1 year ago

Overall the argument by the author is very convincing and well put. One part I don’t fully agree with is

If the trades hadn’t worked out, the losses would have been swift and total. Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing. The entire $2.5 million could have evaporated by the close of trading. Even with SPY shares, any unexpected reversal would have meant millions in losses.

This has exactly been Taleb’s strategy. Buy option where the writeoff is small when wrong and the payoff huge when correct. As described in the post, the ratio was 1 to 25. Also it was likely that the market would go through huge shifts because the policy is so unpredictable.

So it is not impossible that someone figured that it would be possible to just buy these calls for the whole month. As long as one was a hit, the trade would not make a loss. And given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month. These short option bets are truly not such strange ehm options in these volatile times.

So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.

Having said that, I do find the evidence very strong and it’s reasonable to assume that this was insider trading. I personally suspect someone at JPM or Ackman. They said they “convinced” Trump so maybe Trump said in a meeting that it would probably happen and they immediately bought the calls.

dwedge2• 1 year ago

Unless I'm totally misreading this, it wasn't a 2.5m trade, it was 80c per option at 30,000 of them, less than $30k

The option to buy at 2.5m was not an obligation to do so

MichaelRo• 1 year ago

Yes you are misreading because options have a contract size of 100. So you can't buy "one option", only a contract of 100 options at minimum. Which means 80 cents x 100 = 80 bucks per contract. Multiply by 30,000 and you get =~ $2.5 million.

And it's bullshit that you can reliably make money of such low probability options. Even if you do, you never put $2.5 million on something with a huge probability of ending in a complete loss, these deep out of the money options are essentially lottery tickets.

I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.

ncann• 1 year ago

So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.

The volumes are there for all to see and the answer is no.

dash2• 1 year ago

Could you do the rest of us a favour who don't know how to look up volumes on spy options, and post a link?

svg73• 1 year ago

nicely put, but I wonder why you think that similar volume of options would be bought on other days. These days are much more volatile and bets like these love volatility

miohtama4• 1 year ago

Inside trading on political information is legal in the US.

Nancy Pelosi (Democrat) made this famous in last decade, hitting news headlines with it:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-outperformed-nea...

https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-...

Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.

LeafItAlone14• 1 year ago

By Nancy Pelosi, you actually mean her husband.

And if you look at the trades, you’ll learn the biggest secret on Wall Street: make long term bets on tech and you’ll get richer. Don’t tell anyone I told you.

miohtama4• 1 year ago

Family members are often indicated in insider information tradesm they are still trading on insider information when if they are not part of the decision making process themselves. Both leaker and utiliser are responsible.

In the case of Pelosi, she became so famous about this that there are various Nancy Pelosi stock trackers now.

rvz6• 1 year ago

The replies to your comment are hilarious.

Here we have people defending politicians from benefiting from insider information and attempting to split hairs in what is the difference between Pelosi and Trump.

There isn't any.

There is no difference in them knowing something ahead of you and they may have already traded that ahead of the event. (and you copying it very late when the move has already happened).

They benefit, you do not.

ctippett• 1 year ago

404 Media reported a story on Monday[1] about a news outlet that claimed there'd be a 90-day break on tariffs for all countries besides China. This was published a few days before the official announcement.

So someone, somewhere, knew something before everyone else.

[1] https://www.404media.co/benzinga-news-service-that-falsely-r...

w10-13• 1 year ago

Good cover: publicly release a rumor via a random tiny outlet (along with a flurry of other rumors). Then if questioned, just say you heard it there.

tirant4• 1 year ago

Benzinga is not a tiny outlet at all. There’s quite some trading platforms that distribute their news to their customers, like Interactive Brokers.

mentalgear• 1 year ago

The follow-up post shows the whole magnitude of the insider trading:

My previous post highlighted a striking example: how a single $2.5 million options position turned into $70 million in under an hour. But focusing solely on that trade risks missing the larger picture. What we actually saw was widespread activity. Numerous sophisticated traders carefully placing positions across several strike prices ($504, $505, $507, $509) in SPY as well as similar trades in QQQ.
The pattern wasn't limited to a single trade or strike price. It was a coordinated wave of positions, all established within a critical half-hour window before the news broke.
Imagine someone purchasing thousands of lottery tickets with a specific number combination just moments before those exact numbers are drawn.

https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...

qwertox2• 1 year ago

How can the average MAGA voter which waves a little flag at a rally feel ok with this?

It's treason what they did, treason on their principles. All this in times when it was supposedly "Main Street" turn.

https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1910000578198986822

bregma• 1 year ago

How can the average MAGA voter which waves a little flag at a rally feel ok with this?

Apparently most of them are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

barbazoo• 1 year ago

You’re assuming they’ll even hear about it, lol.

tomp3• 1 year ago

Is it any different, in principle, to what congressmen (and women) have been doing for decades? Insider trading, corruption, etc. has all been normalized.

anovikov• 1 year ago

I think we should get over the fact that any pretense of obeying the law and morality have now evaporated and everyone trying to stay in those bounds will inevitably lose because not doing so gives such an enormous advantage. People will not just do inside trades, but will actually cause geopolitical scale events simply to do a good trade.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

Wake me up when orange gets impeached.

jxjnskkzxxhx3• 1 year ago

Wake up, he got impeached twice.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

During this term.

PaulRobinson• 1 year ago

He's a 2x impeached convicted felon.

He told everyone what he was going to do. A lot of people thought he was a lying politician who lies, and therefore these were all lies. Or, at best, jokes or exaggerations.

And now, 4 months into a 4 year term, he's doing it all. Who knew?

So when he jokes that he can do whatever he wants, including run for a third term, learn from the past: it isn't a joke, even if he's chuckling; it isn't an exaggeration; it's not a lie. It's real, it's the plan. Decide how you feel about it.

I'm not criticising anyone or anything here, I'm just stating facts. It's sad to me that so many people think this is all coming as some sort of huge surprise.

jxjnskkzxxhx3• 1 year ago

You know who also told everyone what he was going to do? And about whom everyone said "nah he's not really that crazy, he's just pretending for his supporters". Hitler. Also just stating facts.

NKosmatos• 1 year ago

Whenever I see similar articles I get reminded that all these are worthless paperless money, exchanging hands and playing a game. Futures, options, securities (and all the rest financial jargon) proves that there is a very big economic game at play in a global scale. No wonder the whole planet owes some trillions (to whom?) :-)

There is no need for scientists to prove we’re living inside a simulation, this whole global turn based strategy financial game, affecting our lives, is the proof that someone is having a laugh at/with us ;-)

urbandw311er• 1 year ago

I take a different view. These moments when the mask briefly slips are a chance to remember that we are controlled by a greedy elite and only given the illusion of choice and prosperity.

olelele• 1 year ago

The amount of people in the startup world infected by the American Dream-Logic of privatization and Anarcho-capitalism always astounds me.

All I know and have in my life is thanks to public funding. Social Democracy works and is good for business too. A state with little financial regulation in the end also has less power and control sum total.

Since the southern US basically survives off slave laborers with no paperwork and giving any normal human decency to those people would probably lower the Murican standard of living I have low hopes for change. Here in the EU we screwed ourselves too haha. No one really looks out for the little guy anymore.

tirant4• 1 year ago

Do you have medical insurance ? Or car insurance? I guess you and I guess you find them useful.

All these worthless paperless money as you call it are precisely also instruments for companies and individuals to gain some economical stability during uncertain times by buying contracts and shifting the risk to someone else that has either more financial means or has worked to have a better view of future conditions.

So as an example, your medical insurer and your car insurer know pretty well the odds of you needing either medical treatment or suffering some type of car accident. And because they also have the financial means to risk being wrong, they offer you an insurance, because in the aggregated number they are usually right in their predictions.

udev4096• 1 year ago

For fuck's sake, stop with the academic POV. Look at it practically, it's all just an overly complex system with no actual merit

edweis• 1 year ago

Who lost money during this deal? Or generally who indirectly paid these lucky gamblers?

naught0• 1 year ago

The poors. It's always the poors

mikelitoris• 1 year ago

Everyone else, indirectly. So other investors who weren’t in on it, pension funds, John Doe in his retirement home.

procaryote• 1 year ago

The people holding the ETF and selling the option. If they had not sold the option, they would have benefited from the value rising, now they instead got (collectively) $2.5M.

If the price had stayed flat or dropped, they would of course still have the $2.5M.

The precision makes it look a lot like a crime, as trading on information that's not publicly available is illegal.

michaelsshaw• 1 year ago

This option was OTM so they also (presumably) profited from selling. Just a capped profit

koolba3• 1 year ago

Note that you don’t need to own the underlying equity to write an option contract. You only own the stock as a hedge.

Owning the stock is a specific lower risk strategy called a covered call.

tirant4• 1 year ago

Who lost money? It’s difficult to say, because the purchase of those calls did not really tipped the market in any direction, but just provided liquidity for the sale of those call options.

Whoever shorted those calls made some money in the contracts, but they were going to lose money anyway the moment of the announcement.

quickthrowman• 1 year ago

The market makers who were short the call options or other market participants who sold calls. Mostly the latter, MMs are pretty good about hedging their positions but I’m sure some were caught offsides.

roflyear2• 1 year ago

Long term this also really hurts the faith in the market, so it's going to hurt a lot of people who have exposure to anything on US exchanges.

jaza• 1 year ago

Surely the number one suspect for having made this trade, is Trump himself (and/or his immediately family)? Nobody knew better exactly what would be announced and when, than the guy who did the announcing. Ownership could be hidden behind trust / shell structures, possibly indefinitely, or at least until it's too late for anyone to do anything about it (although in Trump's America, I doubt that anyone could do anything about it anyway). We already know that he's unscrupulous and unprincipled. We already know that he's an indicted felon.

cft4• 1 year ago

"At 1:30 pm, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was pausing most of the tariffs he had imposed earlier that month. "

he actually posted at 1:18. not that there is nothing to see here, but it would help the credibility if the article was accurate

refurb2• 1 year ago

I'd be more interested to see the other side of this trade and how many options were purchase that didn't pay out.

People buy options all the time, sometimes without any insider information, people buy options that happen to just perfectly line up with major market moving events.

Look at 9/11, there were several trades made right before the planes hit that paid out big time. The SEC investigated and found no evidence of insider information.

https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/hearings/hearing1/witnes...

alexey-salmin• 1 year ago

I expected an article about AWS configuration mistake.

DeathArrow5• 1 year ago

If I am not mistaken, Trump said earlier that it's a great time to buy. Isn't there a chance that someone acted on that, seeing it as a hint?

ZeroTalent• 1 year ago

Not with 0DTE options at this scale at multiple strikes. highly improbable. This wasn't the only trade. It was a sweep of hidden trades across different strikes on SPY and QQQ. Occam's Razor says this is insider trading. This has never happened before to this degree. The cool thing is that all of the historical data is transparent and cannot be removed from the ledger, and we can ask and know who made the trades it will just take a few weeks.

And looking at the options flow, it was billions across all the unusual 0DTE trades.

m2f2• 1 year ago

As a foreigner I cannot comment on this, else I will be rejected at the airport by the ICE.

That's called freedom my friends.

atoav2• 1 year ago

Rejected is somewhat euphemistic, you might be:

- held for an indefinite time without due process and information what you did wrong

- stripped naked and spilled with cold water

- potentially worse, but that depends entirely on the way things are developing on a day-by-day basis

And if someone thinks that won't happen to them because they come from a western country and have a low eumelanin pigmentation level, recent examples show that this does not matter¹. Remember ICE also appears to want to police "illegal ideas" at the border now².

These arbitrary arrests, a disregard for the Rule of Law and the valuation of loyalty to the cause over predictable consequences fit the despotic style that is encouraged in the US from the top down lately. The world would be wise not continue betting all their cards on a crazy horse.

¹: Germany, Feb 2025 – Tourist held 16 days at border, deported without clear reason. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-immigration-detaining-europe... UK, Mar 2025 – Backpacker held 3 weeks at Canada border, no charges. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Germany, Mar 2025 – Visitor held 45 days under Visa Waiver, unclear why. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-detention-of-european... Canada, Mar 2025 – Woman with valid visa held 12 days at border. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-immigration-detaining-europe... UK, Mar 2025 – Punk band denied entry, detained at LAX. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Germany, Mar 2025 – Green card holder detained at Boston airport. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Multiple, Mar 2025 – ICE arrested 48 in NM; cause/details unclear. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-mystery-of-ices-...

²: ICE posted a very "unfortunate" marketing picture recently: https://www.newsweek.com/ice-illegal-ideas-border-security-s...

irundebian• 1 year ago

These should be very few cases in contrast to the number of people traveling into the US.

anonfordays2• 1 year ago

If this is in reference to the French scientist that was denied entry, that was fake news:

  "The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory— in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal.

  Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false."

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/20/french-researcher-den...

EasyMark12• 1 year ago

That said you better make sure your "papers" are good. Instead of just putting you on the plane and sending you back home, there have been many recent cases of tourists handcuffed and sent to ICE facilities for a couple of days up to a couple of weeks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/12/ice-to...

https://beatofhawaii.com/why-these-hawaii-travelers-were-jai...

w_TF• 1 year ago

you don't even need insider information to make this trade (although he still might have tipped people off personally)

he literally told everyone to do it

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1143082727259...

and you might have felt especially confident if you recalled him doing the exact same thing in 2018

dboreham6• 1 year ago

I made a trade (very small one) even though I had no clue about his post at the time. My trade was done on the basis that he was clearly either going to reverse or be removed (and then JD would reverse).

minikomi• 1 year ago

Fuck Donald Trump

https://youtu.be/KJ3Lowk_064?si=896OqeAOlC5_0xzh

qwertox2• 1 year ago

This information just feeds my depression.

globular-toast2• 1 year ago

What actually is the point of selling someone an option? Do enough people buy them and lose to make it worthwhile for the seller? Isn't this literally just legalised gambling? Are there enough addicts to make it lucrative like other gambling? Or are these resold packaged up into something that nobody reads à la synthetic CDOs?

dboreham6• 1 year ago

It's basically gambling+, but the party on the other side of the trade is like a casino. On average they make money (usually).

+There are some non-gambling reasons for stock options trading, akin to commodities options being used to reduce risks in farming.

boshomi• 1 year ago

The following article:

»This Is What Insider Trading Looks Like«

https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...

TheAlchemist3• 1 year ago

What's missing as information here, is how often this kind of big bets happen. It's only showing some anecdotical data on 2 days from 2008 and 2009.

I believe he's right, but would just like some more proof that it's really extraordinarily rare to place such a big bets, especially on 0DTEs (which I believe did not exist in 2008).

ndsipa_pomu• 1 year ago

Isn't this kind of thing going to destroy "trust" in the markets? Basically, people who don't have access to the advance/inside information will lose money to those that do - similar to betting in a casino where you know the odds are against you.

This could lead to a lot of investment in the U.S. being diverted elsewhere to markets that have some kind of regulation to prevent abuse.

thrance3• 1 year ago

We just assisted to the largest pump and dump scam in history, a masterclass in wealth extraction by the top 0.1%. This country is headed to a Russian-type oligarchy, becoming a sandbox for mega-billionaires.

Fade_Dance• 1 year ago

I was reading this event, and unless I'm missing something, all of these reports and theories don't mention the blindingly obvious fact that should be dominating - 1pm was the 10 year bone auction.

Due to many factors (mostly around the crash that was in full swing, and a bond market that was illiquid and melting down), this was a key moment around which a huge amount of position management happened.

I'm not at all saying that there shouldn't be extensive investigation around insider trading around the Trump announcement. There obviously should be. And I'm also not saying that a big block of calls wouldn't fit the bill for that. It would (although it begs the question about the actor being so brazen. There would be countless ways to hide the bet more effectively while still producing insane profit).

What I am saying is that it's ridiculous to me that there's no discussion about the bond auction! First of all you can't just look at a block of option contracts independently many of them are part of wider trade structures. Those call options could have just been hedging short portfolio deltas, or be part of any number of strategies. The timing does signify that you ever executed the trade, ill intentioned or not, was aware of bond auction mechanics.

So you're starting to run into some Occam's razor territory here. Either the participant was sophisticated enough to understand the volume surge around bond auction data releases yet chose to do an incredibly boneheaded bet (instead of some sort of more cloaked relative value trade that would make 10x as well, or just making a bet on something slightly less obvious like credit spreads or ETFs that are trade-war exposed, etc), or the participant was making a clumsy obvious swing for the fences, yet lucked into to the minute perfect timing to cloak the transaction. Meanwhile there is the simplest answer which is just that the position was part of the huge wave of trading around the bond auction results.

I'd welcome the investigation, but it's pretty shocking to me that I'm seeing so much discussion around this without these points being brought up!

I manage a portfolio and also put large blocks of options that benefit from market rallies on at exactly the same time. That's because Bond volatility was sky high, and once the results came in, one of the likely outcomes is a huge volatility crush. That means that if you have positions that you've been holding from executing off during the crisis due to elevated volatility, and have a view that the market is nearing the end of capitulation (all of the indicators that most fear, like liquidations, fear/greed index tanking, positioning being bearish, are huge bullish signals to the trading world), then in order to dodge the binary event risk you may want to re-add exposure at that moment. Readings from prime broker reports show that institutional participants were extremely low in positioning, so the risk that would need to be hedged for many would have been upside risk. If someone wants to hedge their upside risk but doesn't want to actively move out of their bearish/locked down positions during the crisis, they may well use options.

(Devil's advocate argument concluded)

notdarkyet4• 1 year ago

This is the most reasonable comment here on the topic. Everything else so far is either blatantly political and/or misunderstands market dynamics.

Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque. Users posting emotionally charged comments and speaking with an authoritative voice on topics they have little experience or knowledge in an accordingly Hacker News has become more and more useless as a news source.

latexr2• 1 year ago

Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque.

From the guidelines¹:

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a² semi³-noob⁴ illusion⁵, as⁶ old⁷ as⁸ the⁹ hills¹⁰.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524184

³ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703

⁴ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513

⁵ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513

⁶ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254

⁷ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657

⁸ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

⁹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767

¹⁰ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852

oa3352• 1 year ago

I believe some of the action around 1PM was auction related, but the options activity still looks strange.

Why would someone hedge with 0DTE options as opposed to normal options?

I’m no longer in that space, but I’d assume the OOTM strikes are less liquid than normal options, with higher theta as well. That looks like a very expensive hedge.

What kind of position would be hedged with these options that couldn’t be hedged with normal options?

notdarkyet4• 1 year ago

One of the reasons hedging with ODTE has become common for event based situations is because they are cheaper than those with expiration's later than the event date

heywoods• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing your expertise on this topic. As someone with limited knowledge in this area, I appreciate your contributions.

I'm curious if you could evaluate an AI response from Perplexity. I asked it to analyze your comment (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/summarize-https-govinfo-lib...) and would value your expert assessment of its accuracy and quality. Perhaps a grade score with brief comments on what stood out?

I feel current AI benchmarks don't capture the data to really gauge how reliable AI tools are for topics requiring some advanced/expert domain knowledge of. Your role is, "expert in the middle" to provide commentary on what it gets right or wrong. Everything sounds right and looks right when I don't know what is what ya know?

testing223214• 1 year ago

That same day after market close Trump directly told us it was insider trading AND who dun it.

He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...

lucaspm982• 1 year ago

Do you have anything that ties together this trade with those investors?

Anyone who held equities that day were up 6-7%, so many billionaires were up that much or more without touching their holdings.

freen3• 1 year ago

This is my surprised face.

Elect a felon, you get felonies.

nanreh• 1 year ago

You mean “official actions”.

freen3• 1 year ago

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

misja111• 1 year ago

And it wasn’t just options. At exactly 1:01 pm EST, trading volume in SPY shares themselves spiked. Nearly 2.75 million shares were bought in that single minute.

This is standard practice, it was simply the marketmaker hedging its position after just having sold those $2.5 million call options.

The math checks out; at 85 cent per piece, those were 2.94 million call options. At 9 above the spot the delta was less than one so I guess you'd need to buy slightly above 2 million shares to hedge your delta. The normal SPY trades would have made up for the remainder of the 2.75 million volume.

Shocka1• 1 year ago

Yeah this whole article is meant to stir outrage - HN is taking the bait, but that's expected. The most proficient people in the world at logic, and they are still culpable to biases. My comment shouldn't be confused though - there is smoke, but none of this is really proof because there isn't enough evidence yet from our perspective.

A lot more details needed: - Is it a fund or individual? - Does the trader make these kind of trades regularly?

I have more questions, but those are the first questions I would start with. I trade 0 and 1 days quite a bit in SPY and have collected a lot of data and performed statistical analysis on them for several years now. I myself sold S&P futures options that morning based off my data.

My theory until proven otherwise - Trader makes smaller trades in 0 days regularly - market volatility and the state of that week gave a much higher probability that there would be an extreme reversal at the first sign of any hint of good news, which was proven by fake news of a tariff lift just a day or two before. The overall bearish sentiment also coiled the market for an extreme move to the upside. Adding even more probability, the market that day was at the same level from Monday, where it showed buyers were foaming at the mouth to buy. Trump tweets just after market open that it was a great time to buy. Probability increases even more...

Similar to a very high probability count in Blackjack, trader puts in a trade at 12 and has an exit plan for 1 or two hours later. Trader determines that worst case 50 to 75% of the trade is lost due to theta decay by 2pm. Maybe they have a stop at 40%? Best case 2 to 10x's their money due to support levels giving a small rally. They've done this before and the wins outweigh the losses. Maybe even a hedge fund or algo trader running an ML model.

In my data I've seen extremely large multi-million dollar call option plays regularly when there is market volatility like this. Until proven otherwise, everyone just needs to stop with the outrage. I'm completely willing to change my mind as more evidence comes out.

sunnyba• 1 year ago

Saw some more granular charts on this for the different options here as well for those interested:

https://unusualwhales.substack.com/p/unusual-options-trading...

bjt12345• 1 year ago

Is it possible someone got the Treasury Auction results earlier and made a guess that Trump would pull the Tarrifs and then made this transaction?

FilosofumRex• 1 year ago

As the old saying goes, there's an important distinction when it comes to appointments to oversee the Wall Street - DemocRATS appoint corrupt rats, while Republicans appoint imbeciles!

Therefore the outcome is always the same.

$70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

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