Placed Before the Memo: Suspicious AAPL Options Bet on a Policy Shift That Hadn't Happened Yet

12 Apr 2025



On the afternoon of April 11, 2025, traders began placing large, targeted call option bets on Apple — almost all of them expiring within days
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The positioning was tight: strikes between $195 and $200, when Apple was trading between $194 and $198. By the end of the trading session, tens of thousands of contracts had changed hands, including sweep and block orders sized well into the six figures.

That evening, the Trump administration quietly published updated tariff guidance exempting smartphones, computers, semiconductors, and flat panel display modules from the “reciprocal tariffs.” The memo wasn't publicized until Saturday morning, April 12. The market hasn’t yet reacted — it reopens on Monday, April 14.

As of now, these trades remain open and underwater. But that only makes the structure more revealing: the trades were placed before the memo was released, and were designed to profit before anyone else could act.

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https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/173-returns-on-insider-information-white-house-insiders-made-billions-yesterday-on-aapl-shares/