The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the tRump Chaos Trades...

[cynatnite]

In the last 10 minutes of trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday, September 13, someone got very lucky. That’s when he or she, or a group of people, sold short 120,000 “S&P e-minis”—electronically traded futures contracts linked to the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index—when the index was trading around 3010. The time was 3:50 p.m. in New York; it was nearing midnight in Tehran. A few hours later, drones attacked a large swath of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, choking off production in the country and sending oil prices soaring. By the time the CME next opened, for pretrading on Sunday night, the S&P index had fallen 30 points, giving that very fortunate trader, or traders, a quick $180 million profit.

snip:

Indeed, this single Trump lie briefly inflated domestic markets by hundreds of billions of dollars. “What this describes is, quite literally, market manipulation that constitutes criminal violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934,” commented George Conway, the conservative attorney and Trump critic.

Whether Conway is right or wrong is a matter of legal opinion, but given how fishy and coincidental the trading in e-minis seems to be these days, the SEC or CFTC would be doing a great service (and their job) for the American people by investigating who is behind these lucrative trades, and what they knew before they placed them. At the moment, what we’re getting from them is an indifferent shrug.

Federal regulators might start here: In the last 10 minutes of trading on Friday, August 23, as the markets were roiling in the face of more bad trade news, someone bought 386,000 September e-minis. Three days later, Trump lied about getting a call from China to restart the trade talks, and the S&P 500 index shot up nearly 80 points. The potential profit on the trade was more than $1.5 billion.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-mystery-of-the-trump-chaos-trades

Fascinating read!

[mopinko]

1. another crime in plain sight.

been going on all along.

[dchill]

3. I've long suspected this.

[2naSalit]

5. Same here...nt

[dchill]

6. It's too big an "opportunity" for a crook like Trump to pass up.

[Frustratedlady]

2. That surely isn't too difficult to track down, is it?

Wouldn't that be the straw/camel's back if they connected it to the Trump clan? You'd think that the law of averages would trip them up and expose some of their shenanigans. I seem to recall market manipulation by Trump for his businesses (Michael Cohen mentioned it, I believe).

George is certainly determined. Bless him! Go, George!

[mopinko]

4. easy, unless you dont bother to look.

esp futures contracts are strongly watched for front running, which this is.

and yes, he played pump and dump for a few years, starting rumors that he was going to buy a company, then cashing in on the bump. he should have been prosecuted, but people quit believing his schemes.