Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny (opens in new tab)

I would just like to know who this was at least.

Pulling the rug so his family members and other associates can buy the market dip.

"We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too. They of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. The lie has become not just a moral category, but the pillar industry of this country."

If you run the numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504505

You will see, that anything else other than a ground invasion, is guaranteed to give Iran a war victory.

1. I was, but felt dumb, like Charlie Brown.

2. They definitely did. There's evidence from prediction markets too, and the timing is within 15 minutes of the press conference. It's beyond the pale because this was a quid pro quo action, where Trump toyed with people's lives so that his campaign donors could profit off his otherwise pointless war.

3. Not true. It is unusual for militaries to preannounce their battle plans to wall street speculators so that those speculators can make a quick buck.

Not traders. Friends and family. These guys are idiots who figure they will all be pardoned before Trump leaves office, or part of the junta that replaces him if he doesn’t leave office.

no one was surprised.

i imagine both sides are actually in the same game.

why do u think trump allow iran to sell oil still -_-. there was a lovely post earlier today on HN laying it all out pretty eloquently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47499822

i personally think the people who do _business_ on both sides will find their way to profit out of this. as they always do.

if u look at the timing of statements u can see its just a game.

Witkoff is a foreign asset. It insane how he's allowed to undermine us interest again and again.

It might in theory be great to have an AI bot do this for all links of known paywalled sites if a good quality free alternative is available and discoverable by the AI bot. The bot could use the web search tool of an LLM service for this purpose. If not available, it could keep rechecking every fibonacci hour for up to 21 hours.

If they want to, yeah it's all traceable. They just don't want to.

The Martha Stewart and Mark Cuban cases were more or less the same -- a non-insider investor was given information from an insider, sold their stock to avoid a loss, and were then investigated for it.

The thing is - insider trading is illegal but it's poorly defined.

Martha Stewart wasn't convicted of insider trading - she was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to a federal investigator.

Mark Cuban wasn't convicted of insider trading either. He wasn't convicted at all. He kept his mouth shut and the jury found him not guilty of insider trading.

She was sent to prison for lying and trying to cover up her insider trading. If she had just admitted and accepted the punishment, it would have been just a financial penalty.

Her blunder was thinking she was too special (or too rich?... she wasn't really that rich) to have to deal with the laws, so she tried to scheme her way around the punishment.

As I recall, her insider trade only made or saved her something like $64k. That's laughably small, and the final punishment to her would have been little more than a slap on the wrist had she not blown it up by lying and cheating to avoid the original punishment.

I hear this a lot, but she did deserve to be punished. Her defense tried to act like she innocently and accidentally sold some stock based on something a friend told her, but they neglect to mention that she her career started as a stock broker and as such should have been familiar with regulations, and she was on the New York Stock Exchange’s board of directors during the scandal.

It's not some innocent mom who accidentally listened to some advice, she really should have known better.

It is very difficult to ship and store oil in the volumes that are relevant to modern economies. We are very much in a situation where some regions are business as usual, some regions can't get oil at any cost, and some regions have so much oil they are stopping production because they don't have any where to store it.

In terms of how this impacts prices, the headline number is usually Brent crude, but there are a number of different "flavors" with various geopolitical factors that influence price[1]. For example, the US market is going to respond differently then the Indian market. The former is a net exporter halfway across the globe from the conflict area, the later gets a substantial portion of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

If the conflict carries on for a while things will probably normalize across markets as production and shipping adjust to the new reality. But in the short term you are going to have some folks mildly inconvenienced by slightly higher prices, while other folks might not even be able to fill their tanks.

[]1 https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/

Most oil benchmarks are futures contracts, so they don’t reflect the spot or current price. So commodities traders are trying to predict the situation 2-4 weeks from now

If you look at this as market manipulation as a method of generating (investment) returns, then it doesn't matter if your public lie only causes the prices to change for a day or two. As long as your people get in in the right direction before your announcement, and then get out right after the big swing, you win.

Who cares what the real price is, right? - especially when you've never pumped you own gas into your car, and you are so out of touch with normal life that you think life insurance costs $15 or $20 (I believe those were the numbers he threw out a few years ago on an interview.)

It's beyond simple supply and demand. This was in response to a social media post that had a tenuous relationship with reality (or 'fluid' as the Whitehouse now calls it).

Oil price is famously disconnected from how much is being pumped out of the ground at any given time. But eventually, yes, if the conflict lasts for long enough material reality will catch up with markets (or is it the other way around?).

Much above $80 and shale oil becomes highly profitable. So swing producers like the US act as a soft ceiling.

You don't even need to trade oil, trading gulf country assets also works well. And rebuilding the gulf should be quite profitable if Iran blows it up and the assets will be available cheap.

Yes I’ve been tired of the bullshit for a while. We’re living in one of the most overtly corrupt government regimes in the United States history. We’ve elected the practical equivalent to Al Capone. Meanwhile, homelessness has never been higher. Rent, food, gas, electricity, healthcare, and so on have never been higher. All while jobless rates are increasing, salaries are decreasing, benefits cut. Richer is getting richer. At what point does the scale tip?

It's not that complicated. Elect a Democrat in 2028 who will nominate a strong AG, not a useless ditherer like Garland. What a disgraceful tenure he had. If he was going to take so long to bring charges he should have just avoided it. Instead he takes 3 years to bring all these charges which naturally look like election interference and as such are paused until they choke the election away and the new justice department kills all the cases.

Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.

I think it's likely that they'll see justice in a chaotic way, ie not connected to the specific crime. Most likely outcome is that they make huge paper profits that are then absolutely worthless because the dollar collapses and the property rights that enforce the wealth they gained from these transactions disappear as the government is toppled. Another likely outcome is that they get in the habit of doing criminal things that piss people off, piss the wrong person off, and then get offed.

There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w18qt5/what_...

> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety

In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.

Organize, organize, organize. With some luck, we can have trials for the crimes of the past few decades and purge our government of hostile actors.

Revolution, not election. We need a new governance framework in the US. I believe it’s genuinely silly to think this type of activity is limited to one party or one administration or that it is new.

I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.

I have accepted that a lot of effort has been put into making sure these people never see justice and they probably won't. I put my energy into strengthening democracy and institutions for the next generation so they have the opportunity to do better than we have.

You are completely right. There are no avenues to seek justice here because the levers of power control the justice. And if the holders of power change, they won't spend political capital on this kind of thing. It's free crime.

Realistically I think it will come down to the aggrieved counterparties here. Who was on the losing side of the money, was it Joe Schmoe day trader or a bunch of funds who lost their shirt?

If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective

Sometimes there is no justice. You just have to accept that bad people get away with bad stuff, usually at a significant cost to others.

> What's the path for that, really?

Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.

This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.

i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.

Donald Trump has one big advantage over many other members of the administration: He will be long dead before the justice system can act on him.

Also something to keep in mind in the future: Old people have no reason to fear prison, they will die before they can get convicted.

The thing with justice is that when you look past it in one place, you don’t really get to ask for it in another. I’m talking about Gaza - it set the precedent that the U.S. and its client state, Israel, can get away with anything. Nothing is out of bounds, criminality is normalized, and accountability is dependent on the identity of the victim. Now that the victims are people affected by the stock market manipulation (people in the West), suddenly we’re interested in justice.

I think one of the things that goes unmentioned in these discussions is that while the US gets a lot of attention for this kind of activity, it has also (historically) been in the forefront of criminalization and prosecution. I may be wrong, but don't know of any other jurisdiction that prosecuted insider trading before the Eighties, and the US has had a pattern of investigating and regulating this since the 30s.

I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.

But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.

(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)

Less power to the government.

Congressional hearings combined with SEC regulatory incursions.

There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.

FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.

If trade were made public it could be very damaging.

Getting rid of the delusion of American exceptionalism in how politics is conducted. In other words, do something about the two party system, or the pardon power or any number of things, the possibilities are endless. But doing anything about it would require admitting that the USA is something other than perfect, so it’ll never happen. Too bad really.

At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.

For starters, you're not alone in this feeling. A lot of us are very hungry for justice, and a lot of the Trump administrations current tactics are openly grappling with the reality of jailtime and restitution if they lose power. These are unusual times, and so people who are not usually inclined toward retribution are hungry for it.

That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.

The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.

> What's the path for that, really?

Elect people who will make justice a priority.

The last 10 minutes of The Sum of All Fears.

Sure, we should ban all insider trading of any kind; including people in congress which have done this repeatedly without any consequences.

Elections and a collectively demonstrated will for justice.

Elections.

Zero when the president has the power to issue blanket pardons to his family and inner circle. Hell, he might even extend it fully to ICE. There's precedent too since the previous president pardoned his son for all crimes committed over a period of time.

"The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it" - https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/us-government-insolvent-fisca...

That’s a parody account. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but if you cannot tell this is parody within the first two sentences then you should be very careful when reading twitter. This is a common format and other accounts are far more pernicious. My feed in the morning often starts with a dozen parodies or outright falsehoods with no community note.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they “let” it happen by optimizing for double clickthrough engagement produced by the inevitable “grok is this true?” at the top of every thread.

The worst part is that the only way to develop immunity to, and pattern recognition for, these parody accounts is to subject yourself to them repeatedly. So the people who can recognize the fake tweets the quickest are also the people who read them the most. And there are plenty who never develop the pattern recognition…

It’s definitely some form of social infection.

People who make 1.5 billion USD trades do not brag about it on twitter.

Poe’s Law meets The Big Short’s convergence of confessing and bragging[1]. It adds up to being completely opaque in terms of veracity and intent, but either way it highlights the real problem at the center of this story.

[1] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ut4C64FKfqc

That reads like it was generated by Claude. Seems like parody but I dunno.

Clearly a parody account...

That’s AI.

I thought people knew not to believe anything they read online?

4 billion in one year [EDIT] in total, not just in crypto. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/14/nx-s1-5677024/trump-profits-m...

Oil Barron... You know we should have seen that coming. Always assume reality to sometimes be more unrealistic than low grade fiction.

Likely just family members. Those seem to be off limits:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-secs-ex-enforcem...

Banana republics can't hold a candle to this.

I mentioned this in another topic by Trump mentioned the pause before the TruthSocial post in an interview on FoxNews. I can't remember who it was with but I think her name started with an "M". If I can find a link and timestamp i'll come back and edit this post.

Insider traders prosecuting insider traders? Don't hold your breath

Democrats: 75% corrupt, Republicans: 99% corrupt. Voting and irrational optimism aren't going to change a corrupt, captured system that cannot and refuses to be reformed.

They already tried for 4 years starting in 2016. It was all a bust even when they played loose with facts.

Nancy Pelosi could head up the investigation. She knows a lot about it after all

Trump is compromised by blackmail and we are fighting the war for Israel.

Yes, I'm not sure what happened. Restored now.

p.s. @dang doesn't work - I only saw this randomly. For reliable (if sometimes delayed!) message delivery use hn@ycombinator.com.

What I find funny is there is zero proof of any connection to the President yet we have 350+ comments of people 100% sure they know what’s going on.

Honestly? It’s all pretty boring.

All the whataboutism in the replies here is amusing, because for once people are actually right, and the OP is also right. People got exactly what they voted for. For many decades now they voted and voted and perpetuated the same system of two parties, each one terrible in its own ways (though arguably one is really quite a bit worse than the other. All that is literally what people voted for.

Biden or Kamala aren't under Israeli influence?

That's the neat part, they get richer whether the war is happening or not. Some get way richer when there's a war on.

Can you be sure the war was not actually started to enrich those people?

Why would we settle for anything less than discontinuing both?