Stocks that were traded with precision timing shortly before market-moving tweets by the commander-in-chief have made several traders or trader groups enormously wealthy and raised questions about insider trading.
These traders may be incredibly lucky. However, they may also have access to information that other people don’t have about, say, Trump’s or China’s latest thinking on the trade war, Vanity Fair reported. Trump is able to move the markets through his tweets — that’s common knowledge.
When news about a potential resolution seems positive, stock markets go up. When the news about the trade war appears negative, they go down.
Here are a few examples of mindblowing trades made shortly before Trump made market-moving tweets and announcements:
Regulators know or can find out who is making the trades, according to Vanity Fair. One longtime CME trader said he hasn’t seen anything like these trades since al-Qaida cashed in before the September 11 attacks. “There is definite hanky-panky going on, to the world’s financial markets’ detriment,” he said. “This is abysmal.”
Regulators say they watch out for big trades like these. But when Vanity Fair reached out to them, the Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission did not respond and a spokeswoman for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange said the trades in question did not originate from a single source and were of no concern.
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In late August, Trump was desperate to reignite trade talks with China and boasted during the G7 summit that China was back the table. “We’ve gotten two calls—very, very good calls,” he told reporters. The market rose more than 900 points in the next few days. However a Chinese spokesperson denied the existence of the calls in the days leading up to the G7. Two U.S government officials later told CNN that Trump, “eager to project optimism that might boost markets,” had misspoken and “conflated” stuff.
That single Trump lie briefly inflated domestic markets by hundreds of billions of dollars, Vanity Fair reported. “What this describes is, quite literally, market manipulation that constitutes criminal violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934,” tweeted George Conway, a conservative attorney and Trump critic.
