The Market Is Being Gamed — And Your Portfolio Is the Loser.
TL;DR
Someone in or near the Trump administration appears to be leaking market-moving decisions to friends — repeatedly.
Unknown traders have made hundreds of millions of dollars in suspiciously well-timed bets, minutes before major White House announcements.
The agencies that are supposed to investigate this — the SEC and the DOJ's Public Integrity Section — have been gutted and seem to be doing nothing.
You, the regular investor, are on the other side of these trades. We’re all getting screwed.
I try to keep this site focused on practical stuff — how freelancers can use investing and retirement accounts to create passive income, max out your Solo 401(k), use a Three-Fund Portfolio, and how to not panic-sell when the market drops 20%, and all of that. I don't wade into politics.
But this is not a political story. This is a market integrity story, and it directly affects your retirement savings.
Republican, Democrat, Independent, it doesn’t matter. You’re being screwed.
Someone is leaking.
Since January 2025, a pattern has emerged that is — and I want to use the precise technical term here — deeply sketchy. In the minutes before some of the biggest White House announcements of the past 14 months, unknown traders have placed enormous, perfectly-timed bets that made them obscene profits. We're not talking about lucky timing. We're talking about trades that hit with surgical precision — hours or minutes before information became public.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman appeared on NPR and put it plainly: there was "no other explanation" for the trading spikes he'd seen. "Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information." Axios, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, ProPublica, and CNN have all independently reported on specific incidents.
No Enforcement
This is not business as usual. Trades of this scale just prior to White House announcements have never been seen before. At the same time, the SEC, whose job is to investigate insider trading, is doing nothing. SEC Enforcement Division Director Margaret Ryan, a former Marine and military judge, quit after six months on the job. Reuters reported that Ryan “had clashed with agency leaders over the direction of its enforcement program, including the handling of cases with ties to President Donald Trump and his family, according to three people familiar with the matter.”
The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section — the unit created after Watergate specifically to prosecute corrupt officials — has been hollowed out with resignations and firings. It has also been stripped of the authority to file new cases.
The Incidents — A Running List
Here is what has been documented so far:
1. Venezuela / Maduro Capture — January 2026 CNN, BBC, and Axios reported on how, hours before Trump ordered the Special Forces operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an anonymous trader on the prediction platform Polymarket placed a $32,000 bet on the operation's success. When Maduro was captured, the trader collected over $400,000 in profit. No one has identified who it was. Polymarket's accounts are anonymous.
2. Congressional Trading Blitz — March 3, 2025 The day before Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada, sixteen lawmakers — both Democrat and Republican — reported hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock purchases. It was the highest single-day volume of congressional stock trading in the period. The next day, the market moved exactly as you'd expect if you'd known the announcement was coming. CNN.
3. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's Stock Sales — February 11, 2025ProPublica reported that Secretary Duffy sold shares in nearly three dozen companies two days before Trump publicly announced plans for wide-ranging "reciprocal" tariffs. His spokesperson said an account manager made the trades without his input. Sure.
4. Attorney General Pam Bondi's Trump Media Sale — April 2, 2025 Also reported by ProPublica: AG Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of Trump Media shares on April 2 — the exact day Trump unveiled his "Liberation Day" tariffs, which immediately cratered the market. She sold before the crash. How convenient.
5. The "Great Time to Buy" Tariff Pause — April 9, 2025. This is the one that got the most headlines. Time Magazine and others reported that at 9:37 a.m., with the stock market already down nearly 20% from its February peak, Trump posted on Truth Social: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT." Four hours later, he announced a surprise 90-day pause on most of his tariffs. The S&P 500 surged 9.5% — one of its biggest single-day gains since World War II.
In the minutes before the announcement, options traders made enormous bets that the market was about to go up. Shortly after the announcement, Trump boasted on video that a friend had made $2.5 billion from the surge. He said that proudly. Out loud. On camera.
6. Iran War Trades — February through March 2026 This is the most recent, and it's the most alarming. Since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began, a series of enormous, suspiciously well-timed trades has appeared around White House announcements. BBC
The big one: on March 23, 2026, in the 15 minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social about "productive conversations" with Iran — pausing planned strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure — roughly 6,200 oil futures contracts with a notional value of $580 million changed hands. Oil prices then dropped sharply on the news. Whoever made those trades profited enormously. The Independent.
CNN also reported that a single Polymarket trader has made nearly $1 million since 2024 from bets on U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran — winning 93% of their five-figure wagers on unannounced military operations. Ninety-three percent. Of bets on secret military operations. Take a moment with that.
What Does This Mean For You?
Feel like you’re playing poker and the other player can see all the cards? The problem — Our retirement investment portfolios are the chips on the table.
When a well-connected insider makes a perfectly-timed $580 million oil trade, someone is on the other side of that trade. The market is not a one-way street. When the insiders win, someone else loses. That someone is often a regular investor — maybe a pension fund, maybe one of the ETFs or Target Date Funds that your Solo 401(k) holds.
This is not an abstract concern. The market's credibility depends on the idea that everyone is working from the same publicly available information at the same time. When that is not true — when insiders are trading on information the rest of us don't have — it corrupts the entire system. It's why insider trading laws exist in the first place.
Martha Stewart went to jail for saving $45,000 by acting on a stock tip. $580 million moved in 15 minutes on apparent foreknowledge of a presidential announcement, and the agencies responsible for investigating it are being run by the same administration it would implicate. WTF?
At the moment, there is no good answer to this. We are where we are. The law enforcement and political question of what should happen is above my pay grade and outside the scope of this site.
The investor question is this: you are competing in a market where some participants appear to have access to information you don't, the rules against that are not being enforced, and the pattern is now documented across more than a dozen incidents.
None of this changes the fundamentals of long-term, diversified index investing. The Three-Fund Portfolio is still the play. Dollar-cost averaging into your Solo 401(k) every quarter is still the play. Panic-selling is still a terrible idea.
But keep your eyes open. And maybe don't be surprised when the market makes a violent, inexplicable move in a direction that, in hindsight, someone clearly saw coming.
Because lately, someone always does.
Sources: Axios, NPR, PBS NewsHour, ProPublica, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNN, ABC News, Time, Al Jazeera, U.S. Senate Banking Committee.
Want more on this: Listen to my fave podcast Prof G Markets: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/prof-g-markets/id1744631325?i=1000757456998
