Alex Frangos

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, which is a big regulator in Washington that looks over trading of oil futures and things like that, identified a bunch of firms that they want to find out more information about, firms that traded ahead of the president calling off the strikes.

Oil prices plunged when that happened.

And so these firms made as much as $5 million, in one case, $10 million in another.

And so the question is, did they have...

inside information or were they just trading based on other signals?

So what the firms are saying is they're pointing to this news report from news website Semaphore that came out around that time that pointed to

The White House may be considering moving in a more peaceful direction at that point.

The other thing is some of these firms are quantitative firms.

They're not manually looking at news headlines.

They're responding to all sorts of inputs coming from the market.

And, you know, they're trading all the time.

And one of the things that the regulators could be looking at is, was this burst of trading unusual for these firms or was it kind of what they normally do?

Yeah, this comes in this context of a bunch of situations where Trump has posted something on social media or said something that caused markets to move radically one way or the other because he was shifting his tone about the war.

And what seem like examples of traders in oil markets and prediction markets and other places trading ahead of that information

And so people want to know, is somehow the information getting out of the White House?

The White House has told its employees, absolutely do not do this.

This is not good.

Obviously, we have the administration through the CFTC and others looking at this.

But there's Democrats on Capitol Hill are really concerned that there is someone kind of taking advantage of White House policy, though nothing has been proven in that realm.

The main tradeoff is if you suspend a tax, then you don't get the revenue.