In a post on his social network "Truth" at 7:04 a.m. New York time on Monday, March 23, the US president announced that is reportedly negotiating with Iran's leadership to end the war. Oil prices fell sharply soon after, and futures contracts on US and European stocks rose.
According to the report, a few minutes earlier, between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m., 6.200 WTI and Brent crude oil futures contracts were traded, the value of which, according to this paper's estimates, is $580 million. S&P 500 futures contracts also saw significantly higher trading activity during this period.
It remains unclear how many of them there are and who made these trades, writes "Financial Times".
"But this is not the first time that unknown persons have made large sums of money by betting on decisions made by the US government and the president. For example, the Polymarket platform has seen high stakes on bets on the timing of US attacks on Venezuela and Iran," the text added.
Someone just got very rich.
As for the now-revealed oil bets, the media quoted an unnamed strategist at a US brokerage firm as saying that while it's hard to prove causation, one has to wonder "who was selling futures contracts relatively aggressively at that time, 15 minutes before Trump's announcement."
They also cite other hedge funds and their traders that have registered striking, time-coordinated trades in recent months.
"My sense is that this is really unusual," one of them said of Monday's trading, "someone just got really rich."
Other traders, however, also pointed out that while the volume of transactions was higher than would normally be expected, it was not excessively high. White House spokesman Kush Desai said government officials would not be tolerated if they benefited from insider knowledge, but called any suggestion without evidence that officials were involved in such activities baseless and irresponsible.
Source: FT
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