On the morning of April 7, President Trump posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran did not meet his deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Less than ninety minutes before that deadline, he announced a two-week ceasefire, and markets accordingly surged while crude oil prices sank. It’s evident that Trump, who has a history of sudden escalation or abrupt backing down based on market reactions, still commands sufficient perceived credibility to move U.S. and global markets in a major way.
Trump unpredictably changing his mind — from civilizational annihilation to diplomatic pause in a single news cycle — is, at this point to many, more exhausting than surprising. What is surprising, however, is that someone appeared to know he would. In the hours before Trump announced the two-week ceasefire, which would send oil prices down approximately 16 percent, traders placed an approximately $950 million bet on oil prices falling.
The suspicious trading has a clear rhythm. On March 9, 2026, a surge of oil bets appeared at 18:29 GMT — 47 minutes before a CBS reporter posted Trump’s comment that the Iran war was “very complete, pretty much” — after which oil dropped 14 percent in minutes.
Again, on March 23, trading volumes on Brent crude jumped from double figures to over 1,600 contracts at 10:49 GMT, fourteen minutes before Trump posted about a “complete and total resolution” to hostilities, sending oil down 10 percent. The Yahoo Finance chart below curated by Axios Visuals visualizes how blatantly unnatural such trades are:
Has there been any effort to investigate these activities? No, and it is likely to stay that way. Since the March 23 trade, the CFTC (United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission) has since opened a probe, scrutinizing trading activity on CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange and requesting Tag 50 identifier records to determine who was behind the trades (CNBC, April 15). The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), however, has not acknowledged the allegations, for reasons unknown.
There is perhaps one “exception.” Insider trading has also occurred on the prediction market Polymarket, although to a much lesser scale. A Polymarket account called “Burdensome-Mix” placed a $32,500 bet on Maduro being ousted between December 30 and January 2 — winning $436,000 the day U.S. special forces seized him. That user has recently been revealed as Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. special forces soldier who participated in that operation, and was charged with misusing and stealing confidential government information and fraud.
What Van Dyke did was highly unethical and requires accountability. But FBI Director Kash Patel riding in to declare he is “defending the homeland and safeguarding our nation’s secrets” — while $950 million in oil futures trades still go unexamined — is not a crackdown, but a performance. It is nothing more than momentary bread and circus for the masses. Prosecuting the lowest-ranking and inconsequential person in the room while the architects of far larger and more consequential face nothing is not justice, and should remind us all of something equally sinister. It is the exact laughable play as his handling of the Epstein Files: release as little and as non-incriminating/censored information as possible to appease and distract the public while not prosecuting anyone important involved.
This is even more suspicious when you consider that Polymarket operates outside the same oversight and regulations that govern U.S. securities and commodities trading. Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to Polymarket and to its “main rival”, Kalshi, and his venture capital firm 1789 Capital has invested millions into the former company. The Trump administration also dropped two federal investigations into Polymarket that were opened under Biden.
The CFTC, the sole regulatory body overseeing these platforms, currently has just one commissioner, a Trump appointee who has publicly expressed enthusiasm for prediction markets. Can we honestly expect indicting Van Dyke to be a step in the right direction of indicting the far greater hidden layer of insider trading behind him when the architecture of non-accountability is being built in front of our eyes?
Insider trading from “superior intel” is not new. Congressional stock trading has long been an open secret. In 2024, Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio returned 71 percent against the S&P 500’s 25 percent, and she wasn’t even in the top five best performing Congress members that year. But hundreds of millions in oil futures trades structured to leave no fingerprint and vanishing anonymous offshore prediction market bets at a moment’s notice, represent something categorically different. It’s a new level of brazenness operating at a new level of invisibility from public scrutiny.
It should go without saying that these trades are not being orchestrated by thousands of colluding Van Dykes with trading terminals while on active duty. The scale of capital being moved and the total absence of prosecution points to individuals far higher up the command chain — people with advanced knowledge of Trump’s decisions and abuse it, whether Trump himself is aware of it or not.
Just as Trump’s tirades and exhausting back-and-forths on Truth Social, eventually the pattern becomes no longer surprising. However, that does not mean it should become acceptable. The U.S. and the world may be a casino, as even Trump admits — but the moment it stops being unacceptable will be the moment the house always wins.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
