General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSr. Analyst at Commodities Exchange: Proof of Trump insider trades, reported, no actions taken to stop them.
The breadth of the corruption is simply staggering. They don't have to hide it because no one will stop them.
Link to tweet
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
GusBob
(8,272 posts)Last edited Thu Apr 23, 2026, 10:25 AM - Edit history (1)
Edit: I see now it satire?
Swede
(39,769 posts)They are stealing from average folks retirement.
tanyev
(49,441 posts)😒
Hugin
(37,922 posts)Less competition, more money.
rictofen
(268 posts)And a Senior Director of Workforce Intelligence at Meta.
And a Senior Vice President of Upstream Portfolio Strategy at ExxonMobil.
And a Vulnerability Analyst at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
And the keynote at a conference called "Geopolitical Alpha: Navigating Event-Driven Opportunity."
And the Senior Portfolio Manager who moved $2.3 billion into risk-on positions because a social media post used capital letters.
And a Senior Director of Engineering Productivity at Snap......
jmbar2
(8,060 posts)Market watchers have suspected it. This lays it out.
Response to jmbar2 (Original post)
chowder66 This message was self-deleted by its author.
tymfinity46
(6 posts)need to see this in the news
harumph
(3,334 posts)jmbar2
(8,060 posts)He's the first I've seen who has laid it out so clearly.
chowder66
(12,384 posts)On April 11, 2026, a series of long tweets from Peter Girnus (@gothburz) on platform X attracted widespread attention. The tweets, written from a first-person perspective, systematically revealed the interest structure, regulatory arbitrage paths, and potential market manipulation behaviors between World Liberty Financial (WLFI) and the Trump family. Two days later, the same author recounted the experience of investing $3,200 in emergency funds, only to have the tokens immediately locked.
When reading the above content, there is a background information that cannot be ignored: Peter Girnus is a blogger known for his satirical creations, whose common technique is to use public financial documents as material, fabricating the identity of a core insider to conduct "self-explosive" literary narratives. He is not a real insider of WLFI, and the details he writes are a literary reconstruction of public information.
This identity statement itself does not diminish the reference value of the tweet content. The core data, document terms, and timelines cited in the tweet can be independently verified in congressional reports, on-chain data, and mainstream media reports. We have stripped these verified pieces of information from literary narratives and conducted a structural analysis of WLFI's actual risks along six analytical leads.
https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/314848478787938
And here....
Girnus frequently posts tall tales about corporate or business failures dressed up as great wins in a style heavily reminiscent of a certain genre of LinkedIn posts. Here is one about rolling out Microsoft Copilot to 4000 employees (archived here), here is one where he pretended to be the "Director of National Sentiment Alignment at Tim Hortons" (archived here), here he is the "VP of Developer Ecosystem at OpenAI" (archived here).
In the past Girnus has freely admitted when a post was satire (archived here):
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-satirical-post-owning-162949320.html
jmbar2
(8,060 posts)I sort of wish that he didn't mix satire with otherwise excellent reporting. Perhaps it's plausible deniability for legal reasons.
harumph
(3,334 posts)GusBob
(8,272 posts)It crossed my mind this was fake
The jibes were too funny
littlemissmartypants
(34,110 posts)And pretty soon you're talking real money.
ChicagoTeamster
(1,109 posts)Last edited Thu Apr 23, 2026, 11:06 AM - Edit history (1)
And avoiding prosecution. Those are the only reasons he ran for President. And the treason he has committed with Russia and now Israel just makes the whole evil cabal even more abominable.
angrychair
(12,378 posts)It's like living in "The Wolf of Wall Street" movie but it never ends. The corruption is on purpose.
JBTaurus83
(1,562 posts)This is another way the Pig maintains control. Those who arent being blackmailed are in on the grift.
SunSeeker
(58,342 posts)popsdenver
(2,417 posts)if this article is true, but I do know that a tsunami of insider trading during the first Trump occupation of the White House, and has certainly accelerated since his second installation........
During Covid, the SEC was tracking trades one afternoon, and the trades exploded in that afternoon. Many of the top Senators were notified in an early afternoon meeting of some insider knowledge about Covid. THAT afternoon, those U.S. Senators, their uber rich donors, friends were immediately notified. The SEC reported that just One female Senator in one of the Southern states had made at least 20 MILLION in trades that afternoon, and they were checking for even more trades by her. The trades were out of stocks that were gonna get creamed during Covid, and into stocks that were going to do extremely well due to Covid.......(her husband is/was the president of the New York Stock Exchange) Nothing about the insider trading was made public by the SEC after that afternoon.......surprise, surprise, surprise. The FORTUNE that was made that afternoon by Select Senators, their friends, their Uber Rich donors, and other members of Senators Families was probably un-fathomable....
And that was just ONE occurrence.......
Now insider trading is a DAILY roller coaster, and Republicans/Trump control the SEC and have emasculated it, like so many other Agencies........One by one, Regulatory agencies are being obliterated, and it is not by accident. Carefully organized and orchestrated not by Trump, but the shadow 2025 group who are actually running things behind Trump with smoke and mirrors. Trump is merely a useful pawn to divert attention from what massive amount of damage they are doing in the shadows, no different than former pawns: Reagan & WBush........
RetiredParatrooper
(197 posts)IDGAF what party they are in.
FadedMullet
(966 posts)wolfie001
(7,839 posts)They ruled that he is above the law: a 34-time felon, SA'er, pedo and a lifelong fraudster. That's who those 6 mf'ers worship.
pecosbob
(8,435 posts)Special ops guy involved in the Maduro raid/kidnapping.
jmbar2
(8,060 posts)Geechie
(1,045 posts)OldBaldy1701E
(11,339 posts)In my field, we call this 'a day that ends in Y'.
Yet another bit of theater for the masses as the rich do whatever they want and continually get away with it.
Because the entire game is rigged. That law is just for show. They had no intention of actually using it.
Until they want to use it to go after someone they don't like.... then it will suddenly become very relevant.
jmbar2
(8,060 posts)That tracks people withdrawing 1,000 from their bank account.
Ruby the Liberal
(26,687 posts)Not being sarcastic! We have all been watching this, and asking if anyone was looking into this - or even on anyone's radar screens. The only attention I recall was when the WH emails were reported telling people not to be criming in the markets. Not a peep out of Congress.
And this guy's hand pops up and starts waving.
I hope to all that is holy that there is accessible documentation on everything he has found. It would certainly be on brand for this admin to 'accidentally' delete the records 'without a backup'.