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Posted on 04/24/2026 8:11:40 AM PDT by Mount Athos
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
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You can also see the author responding to questions in his twitter post here:
https://x.com/gothburz/status/2047148829917528134
wink, wink
I’ve noticed that as oil approaches $100/barrel, there’s an increased likelihood of conciliatory words and concessions.
The feds went after a Special Forces soldier to make it look like they are enforcing the law, yet, Congress is the biggest violators of insider trading.
Someone could watch military base activity and reach appropriate conclusions.
It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it.
People didn't 'have a cow' while Obama was President.
bbb
This is such a typical Peter Girnus “expose.” Every one of his articles reads just like this. Always about some corruption or managerial malfeasance. It’s not to say those don’t exist, but he strikes me as a sprite who is everywhere at all times.
It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it.
~~~
It’s not that big, but it’s exclusive and has a different tier of ethical and legal standards.
Now if you are in the services, and you happen to know about a raid in a country and place a bet on it, you are responsible.
If you are an elected official and sit on committees that handle sensitive data and even secrets and you make great trades on wall street, you’re good to go.
if you could say more about this i’d be grateful.
I don’t mind articles I post getting shot down or critiqued.
I don’t know anything about the author.
Just because Congress does this, doesn’t make it right.
What it points to is that they are ALL corrupt. The legislative. The executive. And all of their staffs.
All it would need is to be someone who knows the person writing the truth social posts. If those posts are delayed 10 minutes, a savvy trader would have time to place orders. It’s a pretty easy thing to track down if someone was inclined to do so.
This is likely a staff person who has developed ties to middle eastern rich guys.
Nothing like a good war to make a fortune!
It’s a small club….and we are not ever going to be members. We are just told to enjoy your gas prices and shut up.
I care a heck of a lot less about this, than I do about the amount of money defrauded from the American tax payer in fake “learing” centers and hospices
WIKI
In January 2026, B-1Bs participated in the U.S. strikes in Venezuela, alongside F-35s, F-22s, F/A-18s, EA-18s and various intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft and drones. The operation resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
In March 2026, B-1Bs were deployed for Operation Epic Fury, as part of the 2026 Israeli-United States strikes on Iran. A post by the United States Central Command on X on 2 March 2026 addressed that, on the earlier night, “U.S. B-1 bombers struck deep inside Iran to degrade Iranian ballistic missile capabilities”, while adding the statement by President Donald Trump that “we’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_B-1_Lancer
Why is it hard to identify exactly who placed the bets in very close timing with Trump tweets or announcements?
If these are White House insiders cashing in with inside knowledge, that SHOULD be very easy to prove or disprove.
Money and market trades do not vanish.
I didn’t hire Trump to have him duplicate Obama’s performance. And I complained when Obama’s prices spiked.
He writes and posts a lot on X. Scan some of his articles at X and you will see what I mean. Every article uses the same writing style and common theme. Many people call him out as having made all of his content up out of whole cloth.
A couple months ago, I was about to post his article “Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.” I thought it was fantastic. Then I started reading the comments by readers who said it was all made-up BS. I honestly don’t know, but how he can go from a senior executive rolling out MS Copilot to being a financial transactions watchdog is suspicious and odd. See what you think:
“https://x.com/gothburz/status/1999124665801880032
I actually liked is article above about rolling out Copilot because it brought back memories of corporate life for me. Not as bad as he wrote, but I had similar experiences.
Is he legit? Who knows.
All the hallmarks of crank writing.
More about him and minutia related to him.
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