Cholleti
Shortlyafter 7 am Eastern Time on March 23, 2026, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States was postponing planned strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. Oil prices plummeted more than 10 per cent within minutes. Global stock markets surged. The announcement surprised diplomats, military analysts, and markets worldwide.
Everyone, that is, except the traders who had placed more than $580 million in oil futures in the preceding 16 minutes — a surge in volume for which no public news could account. The trades were executed with such speed, scale, and precision that Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, in an official letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on April 8, described them as "potentially the largest instance of insider trading in history."
"The facts are so glaringly obvious neither the SEC nor the CFTC can afford to ignore them," Torres said. But this was not an isolated incident. It was the latest — and most lucrative — in a documented pattern.
The pattern in plain sight
A comprehensive BBC investigation published on April 20, 2026 analysed trade volumes across oil futures, stock indices, and prediction markets, correlating them with Trump's most market-moving announcements. The finding was stark: a consistent trend of trading spikes occurring hours, and sometimes minutes, before the President made a social media post or media appearance.
Consider the chronology:
On April 9, 2025, Trump announced a 90-day "pause" on his sweeping Liberation Day tariffs. At 18:00 British Summer Time — 18 minutes before the announcement — trading volume on one S&P 500 tracking fund surged from hundreds of contracts per minute to over 10,000 per minute. Some traders placed bets exceeding $2 million on stock market gains after a week of consecutive losses, potentially netting profits of nearly $20 million.
On February 28, 2026, six newly created accounts on the prediction market Polymarket all bet on a US strike on Iran occurring that day. When Trump confirmed the attacks that morning, the accounts collectively earned $1.2 million. Five of the six accounts never placed another bet.
In December 2025, a single Polymarket account named "Burdensome-Mix" wagered $32,000 on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro being ousted by the end of January 2026. The next day, US special forces captured Maduro. The account profited $436,000, immediately changed its username, and has not traded since.
On April 7, 2026, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. In the hours before, traders placed approximately $950 million in bets anticipating a decline in oil prices. When oil fell by roughly 15 per cent following the announcement, those who had placed the bets reaped enormous, unexplained profits.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Michael Selig on 10 April: "This pattern raises serious questions about whether there has been recurring misappropriation of material nonpublic government information and about the extent to which individuals inside or outside the government have acted on such information."
The CFTC, Bloomberg reported on April 15, has confirmed it is investigating at least two such instances, requesting trading data from CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange.
The regulatory vacuum
The insider trading that is illegal for most Americans under the Securities Act of 1933, and was expressly extended to US government officials by the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, has resulted in zero prosecutions under that law to date. As Professor Paul Oudin of ESSEC Business School told the BBC: "Financial authorities will not pursue a prosecution if they cannot identify the source of the information. You can observe significant trades on a financial instrument that clearly suggest someone had advance knowledge of Trump's forthcoming declarations. Yet there is a strong likelihood that no one will face prosecution."
The institutional framework for detecting such misconduct has been actively dismantled. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section — created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials — has been reduced from 36 attorneys to just two and has lost its authority to initiate new cases. According to Public Citizen, the administration terminated 159 federal enforcement actions against 166 companies in 2025, more than 30 of which had contributed to Trump's inauguration or White House events. Reuters reported, citing three unnamed officials, that the SEC's chief enforcement officer resigned after agency leadership obstructed her from aggressively pursuing cases involving Trump's associates.
The Financial Times further disclosed that a broker linked to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was poised to make a multimillion-dollar investment in a defence-related fund just before the White House initiated actions against Iran. Senators Mark Warner and Adam Schiff wrote to the SEC and the Pentagon's Inspector General on 2 April, calling this "deeply troubling" with "serious implications for US national security."
The White House responds — and admits the risk
On March 24, 2026 — the day after Trump's "complete and total resolution" post — the White House sent an internal, staff-wide email warning employees not to use confidential information about the Iran conflict for trading on prediction markets or financial markets. The Wall Street Journal first reported the email; the White House did not deny its existence.
Spokesman Davis Ingle stated: "President Trump has been unequivocal: while he aims for a robust and profitable stock market for all, members of Congress and other government officials must refrain from exploiting nonpublic information for personal gain. Any suggestion that Administration officials are participating in such activities without evidence is unfounded and represents irresponsible journalism." But the fact that an internal warning became necessary at all is itself an admission. If there were no risk of insider trading, no warning would have been required.
The balance: What we know and what we do not
It must be stated with equal emphasis what has not been established. There is no evidence that President Trump himself was aware of or directed any of the suspicious trades. The White House has denied all allegations. No charges have been filed, and no specific trader or official has been publicly identified. The anonymity of prediction market accounts makes it possible, though statistically improbable, that the pattern reflects exceptionally skilled independent speculation rather than access to nonpublic information.
But probability is not the standard — credibility is. When six newly created accounts simultaneously predict a military strike with precision and vanish after collecting millions; when oil markets see half-a-billion-dollar surges minutes before war announcements; when an administration has gutted the enforcement mechanisms designed to detect such conduct — the cumulative weight of the pattern demands investigation, not dismissal.
The constitutional stakes
This is not merely a question of securities law. It implicates the foundational premise of democratic governance: that public power is exercised for public purposes, not private profit.
The STOCK Act was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2012 precisely because the American people had lost faith that their leaders traded on a level playing field. If that faith is now broken again — not through congressional stock tips but through war announcements that move markets by trillions — the damage to democratic legitimacy will be profound. Senators Warner and Schiff put it plainly: "The perception that material nonpublic information might be distributed unevenly prior to government announcements threatens to erode confidence and integrity of US markets."
The CFTC investigation is a welcome start. But investigations are not prosecutions, and prosecutions are not convictions. The administration that has reduced the Public Integrity Section to two lawyers, that has terminated 159 enforcement actions, and whose SEC enforcement chief resigned in protest cannot now claim that everything is above board.
In March, both Polymarket and Kalshi announced new rules to curb insider trading. In March, a White House email warned staff to comply with the law. These are not signs of a system that is working. They are signs of a system that knows it has failed — and is trying, belatedly and inadequately, to paper over the cracks.
(The author is with the Cholleti BlackRobe Chambers, Hyderabad, and writes on economy, politics and law.)