Trump Media is selling early access to his posts for $100k — your portfolio and retirement will suffer.

The ‘don’t blame me’ blurb: I am not a financial advisor, portfolio manager, or accountant.  This is not tax or investment advice; it’s information to get you going.  Please consult your trusty professional and do your due diligence.  Carry-on!

Want the info early? Pay Trump Media $100k. photo: Andrew Harnik

TL;DR

• Trump Media is selling early access to his Truth Social posts. The President owns 41% of the company.

• Why? Because they move markets, and Wall Street traders can get their trades in before those who don’t pay the $60,000 to $100,000 a month.

• The President announces tariffs, military decisions, and Fed opinions on Truth Social first, instead of through official government statements and press releases. Those posts move oil, bonds, and your index fund prices.

• The investments in your Solo 401(k), Roth IRA, and HSA are on the other side of those trades. Again.

• Put plainly, hard-working freelancers saving for retirement are getting screwed.

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Back in March I wrote about how the market is being gamed — the suspiciously perfect trades landing minutes before White House announcements. I said then it wasn't a political story; it was a market integrity story. Same deal today.

Now the leaking has a price. Normal, hard-working freelancers like us are being screwed here; make no mistake. US and our ETF managers do not have access. Welcome to having just a little less in retirement.

How is it possible the President of the United States is allowed to SELL early access to his posts to Wall Street so they can get out in front of everyone else? Forget about the President being a Republican or a Democrat. Are you ok with politicians SELLING early access to Wall Street?

Taking a step back, why the f*ck is the President making announcements on his own social network and not using official government statements from the White House or the Department of State? How did we get here?

What's actually being sold

It's called Truth API. For up to $100,000 a month, a trading firm gets a licensed, machine-readable feed of posts from Truth Social's biggest accounts — including the President's account. Trump Media's own press material sells it as delivery "within milliseconds."

On the company's first-ever earnings call in August, executives said more than ten customers had signed, most of them high-frequency traders, and called it a durable new revenue stream. I'll bet. Trump owns 41% of Trump Media.

Here's the part that matters: to a trading algorithm, milliseconds are not a rounding error. They're the whole game. A machine that reads "50% TARIFFS ON CANADA..." a half-second before a human can blink has already bought the futures contract, sold it to somebody slower, and moved on.

That somebody slower is a pension fund, an ETF market maker, or the team managing the target-date fund in your retirement account.

Is it insider trading?

Hopefully a court will decide, but I have to ask, why is it worth $100k per month?

Insider trading is buying or selling in the market using material (important) non-public information in breach of a duty of trust. I’m pretty sure the Prez has a duty of trust to do the right thing by us, the American people.

NYU Stern economics professor Gian Luca Clementi told Fortune it's "insider trading by definition." So far, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and The Intercept have sued in federal court, arguing that official statements from the President shouldn't be sold to the highest bidder.

Trump Media's defense is that this is all public information, just faster.

A much more private version of this has been quietly going on for years, with members of Congress trading for themselves whose timing is, let's say, remarkable.

Both sides.

You can even buy the ETFs NANC and GOP that mimic Republican and Democrat trades.

What Trump Media has done is just supersized it in plain view. No shame, 100% monetizing the presidency.

What it costs you

Not much on any single trade. That's how this works — it's a rounding error, skimmed forever, from everyone. It's the same arithmetic as a 1% advisor fee: invisible per transaction, brutal over 25 years of compounding.

Just know the table you're sitting at. Parts of Wall Street are paying $1.2 million a year to see the cards early — and they’re not doing it for the entertainment value.

This is not how investing is supposed to work. This is a politician getting rich by selling profitable information straight to parts of Wall Street.

None of it changes our plan. We still buy a Target Date Fund or use a Three-Fund Portfolio inside the Solo 401(k), Backdoor Roth IRA, and HSA. The difference is that now there is a chance you might be retiring with slightly less, and someone on Wall Street with a lot more.

How’s this sitting with you? Comment below.