NBC News reports: Truth Social to sell Wall Street firms the ‘fastest’ access to Trump’s posts.
Trump Media & Technology Group has unveiled a paid-for, licensed data feed that will give banks and trading firms “the fastest” access to posts from influential Truth Social accounts, such as President Donald Trump’s, whose posts often move global markets.
The product, called ‘Truth API’, will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said.
This is essentially offering a service to have early access to presidential pronouncements of interest to investors, and it is tantamount to an admission that they fully know that Trump is manipulating the markets via his announcements.
It is bad enough, as I have noted many times, that Trump is using a private, advertisement-driven platform that he owns a stake in to deliver official pronouncements of the US government. This just takes it to a new level.
I would argue that this is one of the more brazen attempts at monetizing the presidency because it is so straightforward: pay a fee, get early access to official statements.
Having even a slight edge can make a lot of difference. The BBC reported back in April, The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump’s presidency.
For example.
Nine days into the US-Israel war with Iran, Trump told CBS News in a phone interview that the conflict was “very complete, pretty much”.
The first time the public would have known about the interview was at 15:16 Eastern Time (19:16 GMT) when the reporter posted about it on X.
Oil traders reacted to this news that the conflict could end much sooner than expected by selling oil, with the price plunging 14% in minutes. This added to an earlier fall, taking the overall drop from the highest point that day to 25%.
However, market data shows a huge surge of bets were placed on the price of oil falling at 18:29 GMT – a full 47 minutes before the reporter’s post.
The traders who placed those bets will have made millions of dollars from the movement in oil prices.
In other words, there is already evidence that there is insider trading going on from those who know what the president is about to announce, so why not monetize that so that investors can get a bit of a head start before the unwashed masses get the word?
I commend the BBC piece in full; it has a number of examples.
See also via Yahoo Financial News/The New Republic: Was Trump’s Big Iran Announcement Just a Ploy at Market Manipulation?
