ANALYSIS: $600 million in 60 seconds — the insider trading no one dares to name

When the Secretary of Defense Wants to Invest Before the Bombs Fall

The Financial Times has revealed what Washington would have preferred to keep under wraps. Before the U.S. strikes against Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly attempted to invest in defense contractors. The man who authorizes strike orders was looking to buy shares in the companies that would manufacture the missiles. Read that sentence again. Slowly.

In any other Western country, this information would have led to an immediate resignation. A congressional investigation. A televised scandal lasting several weeks. In Trump’s America, it was swallowed up by the news cycle within forty-eight hours. Drowned out by the noise. Forgotten amid the next provocation.

The Precedent That Is No Longer a Precedent

This is not an isolated incident. It is a system. Attorney Olivier Dorgans, who frequently handles cases before U.S. authorities, points to a landmark ruling: “Since the Supreme Court’s O’Hagan decision in 1997, the definition of insider trading has been expanded to include anyone who gains access to confidential information in the course of their duties. This theoretically includes government officials and those in the White House inner circle.”

Theoretically. That word says it all in this sentence. Theoretically, U.S. law is sufficient. Theoretically, the SEC can investigate. Theoretically, a Secretary of Defense who invests in weapons before signing strike orders is committing an illegal act. In practice, the man is still in office. In practice, no one is taking action.

When Machines Turn a Tweet into Millions

There’s one aspect of this story that most commentators underestimate. Modern trading floors no longer rely on human traders who read the news and make decisions. They operate using high-frequency trading algorithms directly connected to social media. Donald Trump’s Truth Social account is scanned in real time by machines that convert every word into buy or sell orders.

Every single message posted by the President of the United States can be turned into market orders in a matter of milliseconds. Not minutes. Not seconds. Milliseconds. By the time a human being reads the first word of the tweet, the algorithms have already executed millions of dollars’ worth of trades.

The Fundamental Asymmetry

What’s at stake here goes beyond classic insider trading. It’s a complete information asymmetry. On one side, a president who chooses when, how, and on which platform to announce major geopolitical decisions. On the other, seven billion people who learn the news after the machines do. And in between, a small inner circle that knows before anyone else what the president is going to write.

This circle doesn’t need to be large. One person is enough. An advisor who sees the draft. An assistant who schedules the post. A friend to whom Trump mentions his intention over the phone. A single leak, and the mechanism is set in motion. The $600 million from March 23 proves it.

A pattern that’s been playing out since 2018

Wall Street traders aren’t naive. They identified the pattern a long time ago. They even gave it a name: the “Taco,” short for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” The pattern has become predictable. Phase one: Trump announces an aggressive measure. The markets plunge. Phase two: panic sets in. Phase three: Trump backs down, softens his stance, and clarifies his position. The markets rebound.

Those who understand the cycle buy during the panic and sell during the rebound. It’s a transfer of wealth from panicked investors to insiders who know the script. And the script, for the past eight years, hasn’t changed one iota.

April 9, 2025—When the President Says to Buy

The most spectacular example remains April 9, 2025. On that day, Donald Trump issued a message of unusual clarity: “Now is the time to buy.” A few hours later, he announced a 90-day pause on tariffs. The markets skyrocketed. Anyone who had followed the president’s advice made considerable profits in a matter of hours.

A U.S. president who publicly tells people to buy stocks before announcing a decision that will send the markets soaring. Under any normal circumstances, this would be a textbook case of market manipulation. In 2025 America, it’s just another Tuesday.

Legal Loopholes as a Shield

The reason Trump consistently avoids prosecution for market manipulation stems from a glaring legal loophole. To establish insider trading, one must prove the use of specific information about a publicly traded company. Yet Trump never mentions any particular company. He talks about tariffs. About diplomatic negotiations. About foreign policy.

These statements move the markets as a whole, not any specific stock. And U.S. law, designed to track down corporate insider trading, was not conceived for a president who turns his social media platform into a tool for global stock market manipulation. The devil isn’t in the details. He’s in the legal vacuum.

The SEC Is Powerless

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. securities regulator, theoretically has the tools to investigate. But investigating the sitting president means investigating the man who appoints the SEC chairman. It means taking on a political machine that controls Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice. It means fighting with one’s hands tied against an opponent who wrote the rules of the game.

And even if a courageous investigator decided to trace the 6,000 contracts from March 23, they would run into shell companies, offshore accounts, and funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The remarkable thing about dirty money is that it leaves traces only when someone is willing to look for them. And no one in this administration wants to look.

Why Trump Is Obsessed with the Price of Oil

There is a political logic behind financial manipulation. For a U.S. president, the price of oil is not just one indicator among many. It is the variable that determines everything: the cost of mortgages, gas prices, household purchasing power, and voter sentiment. Alexandre Baradez breaks down the mechanics: “Trump wants to drive down the price of oil because it’s the factor that influences long-term U.S. interest rates, which have an immediate effect on mortgage rates and consumer credit.”

Every dollar drop in the price per barrel translates to a one-percentage-point drop in mortgage rates. That’s one more vote won in the suburbs of Michigan. Geopolitics in the service of reelection, financial markets as a campaign tool. The line between economic policy and market manipulation has never been so thin.

Iran as a Lever

Announcements regarding Iran are not diplomatic decisions. They are market operations disguised as foreign policy. Announcing talks with Tehran drives oil prices down. Threatening strikes drives oil prices up. The yo-yo effect is constant, and those who know the beat of the music know exactly when to buy and when to sell.

Iran has figured this out. China has figured this out. Saudi Arabia has figured this out. Every regional power now knows that Trump’s statements about their countries are not diplomatic signals to be taken at face value. They are financial instruments expressed in everyday language. And yet, the world continues to react as if every tweet were a sincere, sovereign decision.

When the President Launches His Own Currency

The situation with traditional markets is already mind-boggling. But Trump has taken the concept a step further with cryptocurrencies. The launch of tokens tied to the MAGA universe—in a market with no regulation, no SEC, and no transparency—represents a conflict of interest on a scale unprecedented in the history of American democracy.

A sitting president issuing a financial asset. Promoting it from his official accounts. Whose inner circle holds a significant share of the tokens. And whose political statements directly influence the value of that asset. This is no longer a conflict of interest. It is a complete merger of political power and personal profit.

The Absence of Regulation as a Strategy

The choice of cryptocurrency is no accident. It is a deliberate strategy. Traditional markets are regulated—imperfectly, but regulated. The SEC can theoretically investigate. Transactions leave a paper trail. Brokers are identified. Cryptocurrency evades all of that.

Wallets are anonymous. Transactions are pseudonymous. Exchange platforms operate from complacent jurisdictions. And the Trump administration has methodically dismantled any attempts to regulate the sector, appointing figures openly favorable to cryptocurrencies to head the relevant agencies. The fox isn’t just guarding the henhouse—it built it.

The retiree from Ohio doesn’t realize he’s funding the system

For every dollar an insider makes, someone else loses a dollar. That’s the fundamental law of the markets: the sum is zero. The $600 million from March 23 didn’t come out of thin air. It was siphoned off from the portfolios of pension funds, individual savers, and retirees who’ve never heard of Truth Social.

A retired teacher in Ohio whose 401(k) lost 3% that Sunday will never know why. He’ll believe that markets are volatile. That it’s normal. That it’s part of the risk. He’ll never know that someone bet against him using information he had no way of obtaining.

The Silent Wealth Transfer

With every Taco cycle—tension, panic, pullback, rebound—the same mechanism at work. Small investors sell at the bottom, panicked by the headlines. Insiders buy back at rock bottom. The markets rebound. And yet, no one accounts for the cumulative cost of these transfers to the average American saver.

Over the 2024–2026 period, estimates from independent analysts suggest that the erratic market movements triggered by Trump’s announcements cost U.S. pension funds tens of billions of dollars in lost returns. Not in outright losses—but in returns captured by others. By those who knew. By those who were awake at 6:49 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Republicans Who Don’t Ask Questions

The U.S. Congress has all the tools it needs to investigate: standing committees, subpoena powers, and access to data from the SEC, the CFTC, and the Treasury. It isn’t using them.

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has not convened a single hearing on the suspicious trading activity of March 23. No official questions have been asked of the Secretary of Defense regarding his attempts to invest in defense contracts. No explanation has been sought from the White House regarding the troubling timeline between the president’s social media posts and the spikes in trading volume on the futures markets.

The STOCK Act: A Law in Name Only

Yet there is a law specifically designed to prevent elected officials and government officials from profiting from insider information: the STOCK Act of 2012. This law prohibits members of Congress and senior government officials from engaging in securities transactions based on information obtained in the course of their duties.

And yet, since its passage, the penalties have been paltry. Fines of $200 for late filings. No criminal prosecutions for insider trading per se. The law exists. Its enforcement is a mirage. And the Hegseth case—a Secretary of Defense attempting to invest in defense contractors ahead of military strikes—shows that even the most blatant cases go unpunished.

France and the Lagarde Affair

There was a time when Western democracies took conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government seriously. In France, Christine Lagarde was tried by the Court of Justice of the Republic for her handling of the Tapie affair—a case involving public funds far smaller than the sums at stake in Trump’s market manipulations. The mere fact that a Minister of the Economy was brought to trial for negligence shows just how much standards have diverged.

In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority prosecuted and convicted traders for suspicious transactions totaling a few million pounds. In the United States, $600 million changes hands fifteen minutes before a presidential tweet, and the regulator looks the other way.

Japan and Zero Tolerance

Japan offers a striking contrast. Japan’s Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission has prosecuted government officials for information leaks that generated profits of a few hundred thousand dollars. The tolerance threshold is low. The message is clear: no one is above the market.

In the United States, the tolerance threshold seems to have been eliminated. Not raised—eliminated. There is no longer a red line. There is no longer an amount beyond which a scandal becomes inevitable. A billion dollars in suspicious transactions is no longer enough to trigger a public investigation. This may be the true measure of the ongoing democratic decline.

When Markets Replace Institutions

The words of the President of the United States have always wielded immense power over the markets. But there used to be safeguards: communication protocols, legal teams that reviewed every statement, and economic advisors who gauged the impact of every word. Those safeguards have been dismantled.

Trump communicates on his own, from his phone, at a time of his choosing, on the platform he owns. Truth Social is not an official government channel subject to transparency requirements. It is a private social media platform in which Trump is the majority shareholder. Every post that moves the markets increases the value of his own platform. The conflict of interest is not hidden. It is structural.

The Normalization of the Unacceptable

The deepest danger is not insider trading itself. It is its normalization. When the markets treat presidential manipulation as just another variable—on par with inflation or unemployment—something fundamental has broken down. Investors are no longer demanding that Trump stop manipulating the markets. They are simply asking to be warned before everyone else.

This is the very definition of a plutocracy: a system where political power and financial power have become one and the same, where transparency is a competitive disadvantage, and where the only question that matters is no longer “Is it legal?” but “Am I close enough to power to benefit from it?”

Who was awake at 6:49 a.m.?

The question isn’t whether Donald Trump committed insider trading. The question is simpler and more devastating. Who was awake at 6:49 a.m. this Sunday morning? Who placed those orders? From which account? Through which broker? With what information?

These questions have answers. The data exists. The digital traces are preserved. The brokers who executed these orders know the identities of their clients. Someone knows. The SEC could find out in a few weeks. The FBI could find out in a matter of days. But for that to happen, someone would have to decide to look into it. And in the America of 2026, deciding to seek the truth when it leads to the White House is an act of courage that comes at a very high price.

The Price of Silence

Every day that passes without an investigation is one more day the system grows stronger. One more day the insiders refine their methods. One more day shell companies multiply. One more day the gap between those who know and those who suffer widens a little more. The teacher from Ohio keeps losing. The offshore trader at 6:49 a.m. keeps winning.

$600 million in sixty seconds. This isn’t a system glitch. It isn’t an anomaly. It is the system itself, functioning exactly as it was designed to function—by those who profit from it, for those who profit from it. And the rest of the world—the seven billion who learn the news after the algorithms—pays the bill without even knowing it.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost