The BBC‘s investigation analyzed trading data spanning more than a year of Donald Trump‘s second term, just over three months after he was inaugurated. The report identified five major incidents in which market activity spiked in ways that appeared to anticipate Trump’s announcements before they were made public across oil futures, stock markets and online prediction platforms.
Reporters matched volume data in financial markets against Trump’s most significant market-moving statements, posts on Truth Social, TV interviews and public announcements and found what they described as a consistent pattern of unusual pre-announcement trading.
Tariff pause
The trail begins on April 9, 2025. Trump had spent the preceding week roiling global markets with sweeping tariffs he called “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, imposing levies on most trading partners. Over the following seven days, stock markets collapsed. Then, at 9:37 a.m. on April 9, Trump posted on Truth Social, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”
His official announcement of the tariff pause came roughly four hours later at 1:18 p.m. But in the interim, the market had already begun to move in ways that alarmed analysts.
The number of contracts traded jumped to over 10,000 per minute just after 18:00 BST, or 18 minutes before the announcement. Earlier in the day, the number had been in the hundreds. Some traders bet over $2 million on the stock market increasing that day, even though it had gone through seven consecutive days of losses. The huge surge could have generated them a profit of almost $20 million.
The stock market saw “one of its best days in history,” with the S&P 500 surging 9.5%, the Dow Jones rising 7.9% and the Nasdaq composite rising 12.2%.
Senators Adam Schiff, Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer responded swiftly. They wrote to the SEC asking it to determine whether Trump, any members of his cabinet or other donor insiders and administration officials engaged in insider trading, market manipulation or other securities laws violations in connection with Trump’s tariff actions and announcements.
They urged the SEC to investigate whether the tariff announcements enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public and whether any insiders, including the President’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause.
The ‘burdensome-mix’ account
In December 2025, one user made an account on Polymarket called “Burdensome-Mix.” On December 30, the account made its first bet that Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro would be out of office by the end of January 2026.
The wagers were placed between December 30, 2025 and January 2, 2026, the day before the kidnapping. The account won $436,000. Shortly afterwards, the account changed its username and has not placed any bets since.
The extraordinary precision of the bet, a $32,500 stake that turned into nearly half a million dollars in less than 72 hours, prompted immediate scrutiny. The account’s behavior of going silent and renaming itself immediately after its windfall deepened suspicions that its operator had advance knowledge of the covert U.S. military operation.
Iran war
In February 2026, six accounts were created on Polymarket and placed various bets on the possibility of a U.S. strike on Iran. When the war was confirmed by Trump in the early hours of that day, the accounts won a combined $1.2 million. Five of those six users have placed no more bets since, but one account’s recent activities showed it subsequently made $163,000 by correctly betting on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire, which was announced by Washington and Tehran on that date.
The pattern deepened as the conflict continued. On the ninth day of the U.S.-Israel and Iran war, Trump, in a phone interview with CBS News, said the conflict was “very complete, pretty much.” The interview was made public at 15:16 Eastern Time. But at 18:29 GMT, 47 minutes ahead of the reporter posting about it on X, huge bets were made on the price of oil falling. After the interview went public, oil fell by 25%.
Just two days after threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants, Trump posted on Truth Social that Washington had held “very good and productive conversations” with Tehran over a “complete and total resolution” to hostilities. The number of futures contracts betting on lower-priced oil jumped several times minutes before the actual post, fell and rose even more after the official post was uploaded. The futures price dropped from under $113 to below $100, before rising to $104. An oil analyst who spoke to the BBC described the timing as “abnormal, for sure.”
Contracts covering at least six million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, were sold within two minutes starting at 6:49 a.m. in New York on the day of Trump’s post. The activity was significantly higher than the average of 700,000 barrels sold during the same time period over the previous five trading days.
The ceasefire bet
The suspicious trading did not stop there. Two Democratic senators wrote to the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, saying the same pattern appears to have recurred in the hours before President Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, an announcement that sent oil prices down approximately 15 percent.
On that day, traders placed an approximately $950 million bet on oil prices falling. Senators Warren of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote to CFTC Chair Michael Selig, asking him to open an investigation into the unusual trading, stating that “this pattern raises serious questions about whether there has been recurring misappropriation of material nonpublic government information.”
At least 50 newly created Polymarket accounts also placed substantial bets that the U.S. and Iran would agree to a ceasefire shortly before Trump announced the deal on Truth Social at around 6:30 p.m. on April 7.
Rep. Torres and the $500 million oil trade
Representative Ritchie Torres sent a formal letter demanding that the SEC open a formal investigation into trading activity in the period immediately preceding Trump’s Iran announcement and coordinate with the CFTC to obtain comprehensive trading records, including beneficial ownership information.
Torres wrote, “Public reporting indicates that, within minutes before the President’s announcement, traders executed large, directional bets in oil futures markets that proved immediately profitable. According to Reuters, market participants placed trades exceeding $500 million in crude oil futures approximately fifteen minutes before the President announced a five-day delay to military strikes.”
Torres called it potentially “one of the largest instances of insider trading in history.”