31 ms·

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

809 points by pulisse 2y ago

DeathArrow 2y 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 2y 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.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
I expected an article about AWS configuration mistake.
aetherspawn 2y 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 2y ago
  Delete along with publicly traded companies, or what’s the plan?
  - miohtama 2y ago
    Socialism. Worked well in the past (:
    - hello_computer 2y ago
      You can have a market economy without immortal corporations. This is something Quigley pointed out a long time ago. The varieties of persona ficta we have created is unlike anything in history. Even the old British charters were limited in terms of either duration, operations, or both. Modern corporations can do whatever they want for as long as they want. They are mostly insulated from criminal law. An individual poisons the town, he gets the lynch mob. A team of executives poisons the town (after days/weeks of cool deliberation), they get bonuses.
    - simgt 2y ago
      Most companies are not publicly traded. Getting rid of the stock market doesn't mean that your local coffee shop is now state-owned. And if they sell specialty coffee, it may not even impact the price of the beans.
  - aetherspawn 2y 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.
    - sethammons 2y ago
      > (regulated) external valuation Is that not the SEC and Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP)? > Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months). Is that not quarterly reports and earnings filings? > Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed Your suggestion was to delete it. One suggestion I've heard is to increase the transaction price, and marginally increase it with trading volume by the given actor. Micro-transactions become too expensive to be profitable.
- hello_computer 2y 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.
  - aetherspawn 2y ago
    Sorry I don’t really understand the part about the tools of Ahriman, would you mind to explain?
    - hello_computer 2y ago
      Technology of all sorts. Engineering, finance, management, etc. I am leaning more on the Steiner interpretation than the strict Zoroastrian one. One could also say "The Devil", but that will really get you people squealing. One could refer to the apocryphal "Book of Enoch" for the details on that one.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  When they say stock market returns 7% on average, it's >7% for the insiders/manipulators and <7% for the regular Joe.
ojbyrne 2y ago
I imagine this is going to happen again (except 100x) when there’s a China “deal.”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hdevalence 2y 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_ 2y ago
  What would determine whether the SEC will investigate for insider trading? I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.
  - solardev 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - irrational 2y ago
      Except the military.
      - amszmidt 2y ago
        Alas, the military answers to the president. Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, "the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Not that the constitution matters ...
        scotty79 2y ago
        Military answers to whomever it thinks it's best to get paid. If relationship between government and the people fails so hard that collection of taxes to fund the military is threatened then the military sides either with the people and deposes the government or with the government and suppresses the unrest.
uptownfunk 2y 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?
- dboreham 2y ago
  That's how prosecution of insider trading crime is done.
vasco 2y 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.
sorokod 2y ago
kleptocracy /klĕp-tŏk′rə-sē/ noun A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.
- testing22321 2y 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 2y ago
    didn’t you get the memo, Trump is the President of Peace. people voted for him because of this :)))
    - sorokod 2y ago
      Two carrier strike groups deployed in the area and B2 bombers moved to Diego Garcia. We will see.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    That seems pretty two faced given their own practices over the years.
torginus 2y 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
recursive4 2y ago
No citations.
- pulisse 2y ago
  It's an analysis of publicly available data.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Do you also require medical examination to identify shit stuck to your shoe?
- permalac 2y ago
  This is public knowledge. Google 'spy insider trading', and click news.
solardev 2y ago
[flagged]
- disqard 2y ago
  ...you forgot to mention her Emails!!!1
  - fragmede 2y ago
    https://www.threads.net/@hillaryclinton/post/DHmE6l7xQnw https://www.threads.net/@hillaryclinton/post/DHmE6l7xQnw
- xeornet 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - pfisch 2y ago
    All governments have some amount of corruption. What matters is the scale of the corruption. Trump and his people are stealing Pelosi's entire net worth like 4-5 times a month.
  - dtquad 2y ago
    The Pelosis' trades are public knowledge. Pelosi and her husband have outperformed the market by being tech-optimistic Californians. One of their most lucrative investments was investing in Nvidia after ChatGPT was released triggering the AI boom. Did that require any particular political "insider knowledge"? No.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      And indeed the Trump trades were after the USMCA was agreed upon.
    - russellbeattie 2y ago
      "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." Wow, a classic example of Brandolini's Law! [1] Two words of bullshit required a paragraph to refute it. Perfect. Just don't bother. They never argue in good faith. You'll just give yourself an aneurysm trying to keep up with their firehose of falsehoods. They know and we know that even if their right wing fever dreams about Pelosi were true (which they aren't), it's obvious that the scale and criminality of what Trump did this week doesn't even begin to compare. It doesn't matter to them. They only want to obfuscate, deflect and ideally enrage. That's what they do. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
epaga 2y 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 2y ago
  why are you assuming it was trumps idea
nramanand 2y 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.
- solardev 2y ago
  In the past, we liked to pretend this was illegal. Now we don't even bother with that.
  - eru 2y 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.
    - dataflow 2y ago
      > 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. [...] So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off. Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference? You might as well say: imagine you secretly give another country nuclear weapons, and assume that that country plans to use them. Now imagine you plan to use them for the same purpose yourself. From the viewpoint of the public, the situation is exactly the same. So nuclear proliferation wouldn't make the general public any worse off. Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
Quarrel 2y 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.
- w10-1 2y 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-epoch 2y 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).
  - Quarrel 2y 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?
svg7 2y 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.
- eru 2y 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?
  - svg7 2y 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."
  - DeathArrow 2y 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.
    - eru 2y ago
      Yes, sorry, I was only replying to the general point. About the specifics we have here: It's sad that the highest ranking officials are willing to corrupt themselves over a few million here or there. (And that's already pretty high by corruption standards. Usually you here of even much lower bribes etc being enough.) To be pithy: I'm not angry that you can buy officials and politicians. I'm angry that the price is so low.
  - TheAlchemist 2y 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.
wiseowise 2y ago
Wake me up when orange gets impeached.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
  Wake up, he got impeached twice.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    During this term.
- PaulRobinson 2y 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.
  - jxjnskkzxxhx 2y 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.
jmyeet 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
- kilroy123 2y 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.
huijzer 2y 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.
- dwedge 2y 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 2y 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.
miohtama 2y 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-nearly-every-180016264.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-outperformed-nea... https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-pelosi-to-be-prosecuted-over-visa-stock-trade/ https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-... Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.
- LeafItAlone 2y 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.
  - miohtama 2y 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.
    - LeafItAlone 2y ago
      Let’s be real: Pelosi became famous for it because right-leaning groups were looking for yet another thing to put on her and then it was picked up by WSB and became a meme. Pelosi’s rate of return isn’t the highest (in 2024, it was 10th, less than half the highest). If you analyze their trades, very few are suspect of timing. They just make a bunch of long term bets on tech. https://www.fool.com/research/congressional-stock-trading-who-trades-and-makes-the-most/ https://www.fool.com/research/congressional-stock-trading-wh...
      - Jensson 2y ago
ctippett 2y 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-reported-a-possible-90-day-break-in-tariffs-blames-x/ https://www.404media.co/benzinga-news-service-that-falsely-r...
- w10-1 2y 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.
  - tirant 2y 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.
    - tradethedelta 2y ago
      Benzinga has probably 40 writers or so. And they do syndicate out to other platforms. They also sell their real-time web traffic and ticker attribution data to hedge funds who will trade on the info.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mentalgear 2y 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-trading-looks-like/ https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...
- qwertox 2y 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 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1910000578198986822
  - bregma 2y 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 2y ago
    You’re assuming they’ll even hear about it, lol.
  - tomp 2y 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 2y 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.
Haeuserschlucht 2y ago
[flagged]
tyiz 2y ago
[dead]
NKosmatos 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
    - tirant 2y ago
      That is actually incorrect. What you call public funding has been before produced by private individuals or private companies. The State barely generates any money itself. And when it does in large amounts by printing new money it’s actually analog to extorting money to everyone else in the society by impoverishing them via inflation. There is a common believe that humans would never be generous, altruistic without a State forcing them. And that’s actually quite the opposite. Humankind would have never made it if that was the case. You can observe it clearly still in lots of societies populating earth, specially the poorest ones without public services. It’s actually the unconditional access to public services that has incentivized the individuality of our society nowadays. If I’m already supported by the State why should I make any effort towards my society? In the past without public services, interaction with your local community was a must. But it’s also a problem as a donor or supporter: how can I support or donate to any cause if the State is already taxing 50% of my wealth and I have barely any money to buy a house?
edweis 2y ago
Who lost money during this deal? Or generally who indirectly paid these lucky gamblers?
- naught0 2y ago
  The poors. It's always the poors
- mikelitoris 2y ago
  Everyone else, indirectly. So other investors who weren’t in on it, pension funds, John Doe in his retirement home.
- procaryote 2y 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 2y ago
    This option was OTM so they also (presumably) profited from selling. Just a capped profit
  - koolba 2y 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.
- tirant 2y 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.
jaza 2y 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.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cft 2y 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
refurb 2y 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/witness_kleinberg.htm https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/hearings/hearing1/witnes...
m2f2 2y 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.
- atoav 2y 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-european-tourists-borders/ 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-trump-immigration-arrests 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-and-canadian-tourists-creates-fear-over-traveling-to-america 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-european-tourists-borders/ 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-trump-immigration-arrests 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-trump-immigration-arrests 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-unidentifiable-arrests 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-social-media-post-2058217 https://www.newsweek.com/ice-illegal-ideas-border-security-s...
w_TF 2y 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/114308272725981913 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1143082727259... and you might have felt especially confident if you recalled him doing the exact same thing in 2018
- dboreham 2y 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 2y ago
Fuck Donald Trump https://youtu.be/KJ3Lowk_064?si=896OqeAOlC5_0xzh https://youtu.be/KJ3Lowk_064?si=896OqeAOlC5_0xzh
qwertox 2y ago
This information just feeds my depression.
globular-toast 2y 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?
- dboreham 2y 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 2y ago
The following article: »This Is What Insider Trading Looks Like« https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trading-looks-like/ https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...
TheAlchemist 2y 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 2y 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.
thrance 2y 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 2y 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)
testing22321 2y 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/trump_after_market_close_yesterday_he_made_25/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...
- lucaspm98 2y 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.
freen 2y ago
This is my surprised face. Elect a felon, you get felonies.
- nanreh 2y ago
  You mean “official actions”.
  - freen 2y 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.
    - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
      Well, someone voted for him.
      - freen 2y ago
        PT Barnum was a rich man.
misja111 2y 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 1y 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 2y 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-before-trumps https://unusualwhales.substack.com/p/unusual-options-trading...
bjt12345 2y 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?
Mani_Pathak 2y ago
[dead]
methods21 1y ago
How can any trade be made and not know 'who' made the trade? Doesn't every trading account need to be registered/identified in some manner? KYC right? At a minimum the account holder would want to transfer funds to/from account.... I can't even buy sudafed without 3 forms of ID, yet we have 'invisible' traders of millions of dollars?
FilosofumRex 1y 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.

809 points by pulisse 2y 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 2y 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.

alexey-salmin 2y ago

I expected an article about AWS configuration mistake.

aetherspawn 2y 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 2y ago
Delete along with publicly traded companies, or what’s the plan?
- miohtama 2y ago
  Socialism. Worked well in the past (:
  - hello_computer 2y ago
    You can have a market economy without immortal corporations. This is something Quigley pointed out a long time ago. The varieties of persona ficta we have created is unlike anything in history. Even the old British charters were limited in terms of either duration, operations, or both. Modern corporations can do whatever they want for as long as they want. They are mostly insulated from criminal law. An individual poisons the town, he gets the lynch mob. A team of executives poisons the town (after days/weeks of cool deliberation), they get bonuses.
  - simgt 2y ago
    Most companies are not publicly traded. Getting rid of the stock market doesn't mean that your local coffee shop is now state-owned. And if they sell specialty coffee, it may not even impact the price of the beans.
- aetherspawn 2y 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.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    > (regulated) external valuation Is that not the SEC and Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP)? > Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months). Is that not quarterly reports and earnings filings? > Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed Your suggestion was to delete it. One suggestion I've heard is to increase the transaction price, and marginally increase it with trading volume by the given actor. Micro-transactions become too expensive to be profitable.
hello_computer 2y 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.
- aetherspawn 2y ago
  Sorry I don’t really understand the part about the tools of Ahriman, would you mind to explain?
  - hello_computer 2y ago
    Technology of all sorts. Engineering, finance, management, etc. I am leaning more on the Steiner interpretation than the strict Zoroastrian one. One could also say "The Devil", but that will really get you people squealing. One could refer to the apocryphal "Book of Enoch" for the details on that one.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
When they say stock market returns 7% on average, it's >7% for the insiders/manipulators and <7% for the regular Joe.

ojbyrne 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

hdevalence 2y 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_ 2y ago
What would determine whether the SEC will investigate for insider trading? I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.
- solardev 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - irrational 2y ago
    Except the military.
    - amszmidt 2y ago
      Alas, the military answers to the president. Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, "the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Not that the constitution matters ...
      - scotty79 2y ago
        Military answers to whomever it thinks it's best to get paid. If relationship between government and the people fails so hard that collection of taxes to fund the military is threatened then the military sides either with the people and deposes the government or with the government and suppresses the unrest.

uptownfunk 2y 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?

dboreham 2y ago
That's how prosecution of insider trading crime is done.

vasco 2y 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.

sorokod 2y ago

kleptocracy /klĕp-tŏk′rə-sē/ noun A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.

testing22321 2y 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 2y ago
  didn’t you get the memo, Trump is the President of Peace. people voted for him because of this :)))
  - sorokod 2y ago
    Two carrier strike groups deployed in the area and B2 bombers moved to Diego Garcia. We will see.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  That seems pretty two faced given their own practices over the years.

torginus 2y 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

recursive4 2y ago

No citations.

pulisse 2y ago
It's an analysis of publicly available data.
wiseowise 2y ago
Do you also require medical examination to identify shit stuck to your shoe?
permalac 2y ago
This is public knowledge. Google 'spy insider trading', and click news.

solardev 2y ago

[flagged]

disqard 2y ago
...you forgot to mention her Emails!!!1
- fragmede 2y ago
  https://www.threads.net/@hillaryclinton/post/DHmE6l7xQnw https://www.threads.net/@hillaryclinton/post/DHmE6l7xQnw
xeornet 2y ago
[flagged]
- pfisch 2y ago
  All governments have some amount of corruption. What matters is the scale of the corruption. Trump and his people are stealing Pelosi's entire net worth like 4-5 times a month.
- dtquad 2y ago
  The Pelosis' trades are public knowledge. Pelosi and her husband have outperformed the market by being tech-optimistic Californians. One of their most lucrative investments was investing in Nvidia after ChatGPT was released triggering the AI boom. Did that require any particular political "insider knowledge"? No.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    And indeed the Trump trades were after the USMCA was agreed upon.
  - russellbeattie 2y ago
    "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." Wow, a classic example of Brandolini's Law! [1] Two words of bullshit required a paragraph to refute it. Perfect. Just don't bother. They never argue in good faith. You'll just give yourself an aneurysm trying to keep up with their firehose of falsehoods. They know and we know that even if their right wing fever dreams about Pelosi were true (which they aren't), it's obvious that the scale and criminality of what Trump did this week doesn't even begin to compare. It doesn't matter to them. They only want to obfuscate, deflect and ideally enrage. That's what they do. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

epaga 2y 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 2y ago
why are you assuming it was trumps idea

nramanand 2y 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.

solardev 2y ago
In the past, we liked to pretend this was illegal. Now we don't even bother with that.
- eru 2y 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.
  - dataflow 2y ago
    > 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. [...] So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off. Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference? You might as well say: imagine you secretly give another country nuclear weapons, and assume that that country plans to use them. Now imagine you plan to use them for the same purpose yourself. From the viewpoint of the public, the situation is exactly the same. So nuclear proliferation wouldn't make the general public any worse off. Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.

Quarrel 2y 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.

w10-1 2y 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-epoch 2y 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).
- Quarrel 2y 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?

svg7 2y 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.

eru 2y 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?
- svg7 2y 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."
- DeathArrow 2y 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.
  - eru 2y ago
    Yes, sorry, I was only replying to the general point. About the specifics we have here: It's sad that the highest ranking officials are willing to corrupt themselves over a few million here or there. (And that's already pretty high by corruption standards. Usually you here of even much lower bribes etc being enough.) To be pithy: I'm not angry that you can buy officials and politicians. I'm angry that the price is so low.
- TheAlchemist 2y 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.

wiseowise 2y ago

Wake me up when orange gets impeached.

jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
Wake up, he got impeached twice.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  During this term.
PaulRobinson 2y 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.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 2y 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.

jmyeet 2y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

kilroy123 2y 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.

huijzer 2y 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.

dwedge 2y 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 2y 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.

miohtama 2y 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-nearly-every-180016264.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-outperformed-nea... https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-pelosi-to-be-prosecuted-over-visa-stock-trade/ https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-... Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.

LeafItAlone 2y 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.
- miohtama 2y 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.
  - LeafItAlone 2y ago
    Let’s be real: Pelosi became famous for it because right-leaning groups were looking for yet another thing to put on her and then it was picked up by WSB and became a meme. Pelosi’s rate of return isn’t the highest (in 2024, it was 10th, less than half the highest). If you analyze their trades, very few are suspect of timing. They just make a bunch of long term bets on tech. https://www.fool.com/research/congressional-stock-trading-who-trades-and-makes-the-most/ https://www.fool.com/research/congressional-stock-trading-wh...
    - Jensson 2y ago

ctippett 2y 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-reported-a-possible-90-day-break-in-tariffs-blames-x/ https://www.404media.co/benzinga-news-service-that-falsely-r...

w10-1 2y 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.
- tirant 2y 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.
  - tradethedelta 2y ago
    Benzinga has probably 40 writers or so. And they do syndicate out to other platforms. They also sell their real-time web traffic and ticker attribution data to hedge funds who will trade on the info.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mentalgear 2y 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-trading-looks-like/ https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...

qwertox 2y 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 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1910000578198986822
- bregma 2y 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 2y ago
  You’re assuming they’ll even hear about it, lol.
- tomp 2y 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 2y 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.

Haeuserschlucht 2y ago

[flagged]

tyiz 2y ago

[dead]

NKosmatos 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.
  - tirant 2y ago
    That is actually incorrect. What you call public funding has been before produced by private individuals or private companies. The State barely generates any money itself. And when it does in large amounts by printing new money it’s actually analog to extorting money to everyone else in the society by impoverishing them via inflation. There is a common believe that humans would never be generous, altruistic without a State forcing them. And that’s actually quite the opposite. Humankind would have never made it if that was the case. You can observe it clearly still in lots of societies populating earth, specially the poorest ones without public services. It’s actually the unconditional access to public services that has incentivized the individuality of our society nowadays. If I’m already supported by the State why should I make any effort towards my society? In the past without public services, interaction with your local community was a must. But it’s also a problem as a donor or supporter: how can I support or donate to any cause if the State is already taxing 50% of my wealth and I have barely any money to buy a house?

edweis 2y ago

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

naught0 2y ago
The poors. It's always the poors
mikelitoris 2y ago
Everyone else, indirectly. So other investors who weren’t in on it, pension funds, John Doe in his retirement home.
procaryote 2y 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 2y ago
  This option was OTM so they also (presumably) profited from selling. Just a capped profit
- koolba 2y 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.
tirant 2y 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.

jaza 2y 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.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cft 2y 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

refurb 2y 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/witness_kleinberg.htm https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/hearings/hearing1/witnes...

m2f2 2y 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.

atoav 2y 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-european-tourists-borders/ 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-trump-immigration-arrests 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-and-canadian-tourists-creates-fear-over-traveling-to-america 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-european-tourists-borders/ 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-trump-immigration-arrests 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-trump-immigration-arrests 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-unidentifiable-arrests 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-social-media-post-2058217 https://www.newsweek.com/ice-illegal-ideas-border-security-s...

w_TF 2y 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/114308272725981913 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1143082727259... and you might have felt especially confident if you recalled him doing the exact same thing in 2018

dboreham 2y 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 2y ago

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

qwertox 2y ago

This information just feeds my depression.

globular-toast 2y 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?

dboreham 2y 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 2y ago

The following article: »This Is What Insider Trading Looks Like« https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trading-looks-like/ https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...

TheAlchemist 2y 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 2y 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.

thrance 2y 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 2y 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)

testing22321 2y 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/trump_after_market_close_yesterday_he_made_25/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...

lucaspm98 2y 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.

freen 2y ago

This is my surprised face. Elect a felon, you get felonies.

nanreh 2y ago
You mean “official actions”.
- freen 2y 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.
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    Well, someone voted for him.
    - freen 2y ago
      PT Barnum was a rich man.

misja111 2y 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 1y 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 2y 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-before-trumps https://unusualwhales.substack.com/p/unusual-options-trading...

bjt12345 2y 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?

Mani_Pathak 2y ago

[dead]

methods21 1y ago

How can any trade be made and not know 'who' made the trade? Doesn't every trading account need to be registered/identified in some manner? KYC right? At a minimum the account holder would want to transfer funds to/from account.... I can't even buy sudafed without 3 forms of ID, yet we have 'invisible' traders of millions of dollars?

FilosofumRex 1y 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.