Huge bets keep surfacing on prediction platforms right before President Trump jolts the markets with surprise announcements—but the White House insists there is nothing to see here.
The latest flashpoint came early Monday, when an abrupt burst of oil-futures trading hit the market about 15 minutes before Trump announced he was delaying threatened strikes on Iranian energy targets.
As the Daily Beast reported Tuesday, the trades were worth roughly $580 million. Oil prices then dropped sharply after Trump’s post, while stock futures jumped.
The White House moved quickly to bat the story away, with spokesperson Kush Desai branding suggestions that administration officials may have been profiting from nonpublic information “baseless and irresponsible.”
But the Iran trades were not an isolated blip. Axios reported Wednesday that, before the first U.S. strike on Iran, more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed four-figure bets predicting an American attack by the next day.
Since then, other traders have piled into ceasefire bets ahead of Trump’s shifting public line on diplomacy, prompting fresh warnings from market watchers that prediction markets are becoming a handy place to hide suspiciously well-timed wagers.
The well-timed trades are not limited to the Iran crisis. A Jan. 2 Polymarket wager turned roughly $32,000 into more than $400,000 for an anonymous user who bet on the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro just before the U.S. military’s Caracas operation was publicly announced.
And after Trump’s tariff shocks last spring, unidentified traders placed multi-million-dollar options bets in the minutes before he suddenly paused many of those duties for 90 days on April 9, 2025.
None of that, on its own, proves insider trading. The accounts are anonymous. Some of the trades could have been aggressive speculation, hedging, or lucky timing in hyper-volatile markets.
Reuters said exactly that after the tariff-pause trades, noting that experts found it hard to say with confidence which bets were truly suspicious. Axios made the same point about the Iran and Maduro episodes.
“The president has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities. President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner and to suggest otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious,” White House counsel David Warrington was quoted telling Axios.
But critics say what makes the pattern harder to shrug off is the backdrop against which it is unfolding. Reuters reported in March 2025 that the administration was considering gutting the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the unit that handles many of the country’s most politically sensitive corruption cases. NOTUS later reported that the section had fallen from 36 full-time lawyers to just two.
Reuters also reported this week that the SEC’s enforcement chief quit last week after clashing with agency leadership over cases touching Trump’s orbit, though an SEC spokesperson said the agency applies securities laws faithfully. Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, said in January that the administration had canceled or frozen 159 enforcement actions against 166 companies, many of which have links to the Trump administration.
The controversial trades have led critics, particularly among House Democrats, to demand closer scrutiny.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
