It’d Be Nice If Someone Looked at Suspicious Trades Preceding Trump’s Iran Post

In a functioning democracy, somebody in the government would definitely investigate a series of suspicious trades made minutes before Donald Trump claimed in a social media post that he would delay the promised strikes on Iran’s power plants because of “very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.”

Until the president posted that message, it looked as though the situation was about to escalate further with both the US and Tehran vowing to attack vital energy infrastructure in the region, which surely would have jolted markets and caused oil prices to spike further.

Therefore, it is curious that one or more fortuitous traders had bet hundreds of millions of dollars mere minutes earlier that stock prices would go up and oil prices would plummet. And that’s exactly what happened when the market reacted to this welcome news from the president.

As a result, our lucky traders pocketed tens of millions of dollars in half an hour’s work.

Everything about these trades, from their volume to their timing, is shady.

In fact, the president’s message, which was clearly intended to calm the markets, is suspect as well because it seems to be bogus. Iran quickly denied that the negotiations Trump wrote about were taking place.

However, it clearly had the desired effect.

As the Kobeissi Letter, a leading publication covering financial markets, pointed out, Trump’s post and the subsequent denial from Tehran that these negotiations were happening resulted in a $3 trillion swing in market capitalization in less than an hour.

“What is happening here?” the publication’s account on X asked in a post.

We’ll take a stab at answering that one.

What appears to have happened is that somebody with advance knowledge of what the president was about to post got really rich. We’re not saying that it was a Trump family member or somebody from his inner circle because it also could have been time travelers… perhaps the same ones who made a million bucks by predicting with pinpoint accuracy when the US would attack Iran.

Those “bets,” by the way, are even more problematic because they could have tipped off Tehran that strikes were coming. In the future, it stands to reason that adversaries of the US will monitor betting markets to see when somebody with advance knowledge of a major event is trying to cash in.

Like we said, in a functioning democracy, these things would raise all kinds of red flags.

In the Trumpian kleptocracy, however, we doubt that anybody is going to look into this all that hard… in part because one of the people who would just quit her job.

Earlier this month, Margaret Ryan, who headed the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), left her position with barely anybody noticing. On Monday, Reuters reported that she 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.”

We’ll go out on a limb and assume that she didn’t quit because she wanted fewer investigations into the president and his brood.

For the Trumps, it’s been a great year. While they have successfully grifted their way through the president’s first term, 2025 has been a veritable bonanza for them. From meme coins to investments in drone companies vying for Pentagon contracts, Melania’s documentary, and of course the usual Trump rackets that netted him a jet and other trinkets, they have likely made billions of dollars.

What’s most concerning is that all of this is happening so brazenly… as though the president and those around him are not concerned about being held to account in the future at all. Of course, the only way they could be assured of that is if they do not plan to relinquish power no matter what.