Actually, “we”, collectively, do know, because the SEC maintains an “XKEYSCORE for equities” called CAT.
If there was interest, the government could know exactly who placed these trades. But the call (options) are coming from inside the house.
https://catnmsplan.com/sites/default/files/2025-04/04.01.25-...
Also, CAT is run by CATNMS, LLC which was created in response to an SEC rule 613, however it is operated by the same consortium of SROs that it purports to provide oversight on...
All these layers of responsibility diffusion and a notable absence of penalties for failing to meet rule 613 guidelines mean that rule is little more than for show.
I'm not a legal expert at all but so far the most useful mental model has been to assume absolutely no one is shielded from executive power (including organizations and people entirely outside the federal government) unless the courts have delivered a final ruling on it.
This is a serious question. What have I missed?
Also, it's not that I think they won't defy courts but they'll be very careful in doing it (well, at least as careful as this administration can be) so it's still a reasonable base assumption that court orders protect you since while it's not the ironclad protection it was it still gives you some protection for now. Though that "for now" is obviously rather ominous.
In the past month the SEC has stopped most enforcement actions involving crypto.
This explains how, written just before Trump assumed power:
While he can't force Gensler to step down as a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he can name a new interim SEC chair as soon as he's inaugurated on Jan. 20. He can also nominate a new commissioner to the Senate, which has to confirm the pick.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/07/heres-how-quickly...
And Gensler resigned as Chair as soon as Jan 20th:
In general I think you’re correct because the “inside” information is typically not as broad or powerful. But I don’t think we live in general times. If POTUS gave me personally a heads up about such adjustments on tariffs, after watching indexes tumble after announcing them, and knowing the opposite direction, I would dump almost everything I had access to in such stocks largely effected by reevaluation from tariffs.
Knowing major policy shifts before they happen from one of the powerful governments in the world is useful information, especially when the policies are being set by a handful of people who can limit access to knowledge escaping even more than regularly so markets don’t adjust from larger sets of insider information.
Now is it really considered “insider” trading in this case? Probably not, and this administration can get away with anything it seems.
Such an expectation was rational prior to 2025-01-20. Since then it's been completely counterfactual.
All depends on if it's in the storm path drawn by the Presidential Sharpie.
[0] First Trump threatened to nuke hurricanes. Now he’s waging war on weather forecasters
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/04/trump-...
Of course lots of voters (specifically the ones that voted for this) are pretty happy with the way things are going. So any kind of blowback is uncertain at best.
If the population were genuinely interested in removing Trump, they could elect 60 democrats to the senate and a house majority, then impeach. But again, a healthy chunk are happy, and a lot if the rest can't vote Democrat for social / tribal reasons.
But make no mistake, he operates above the law because the people think it's OK. They alone have the power to remove him.
Not necessarily. First for soft reasons: media and tech companies spreading disinformation. Second for hard reasons: elections can be postponed for <reasons>.
Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, "the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States."
Not that the constitution matters ...
It is also worth mentioning that the military is not a uniform and monolithic entity. If you're asking what arm is on the other side of that civil war, well it was originally part of the one the initiated the coup in the first place.
Trust me, no one wants a military coup. It should not be a tool used lightly. Do not ask for this until all other options have been exhausted
It's when the orders come in to directly use military force to support unconstitutional acts that we find out, not simply when the military fails to intervene in legal disputes.
This process was exactly what could be observed in Portugal in the beginning of the 2010 decade.
The opposition was not able to buy the military, and the government was returned to power by by promising raise in payment.
U.S. law requires the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of staff of the Army, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the commandant of the Marine Corps, or the commander of a unified or specified combatant command.
Just after 2:00 a.m. eastern time this morning, the Senate confirmed Retired Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan Caine, who goes by the nickname “Razin,” for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a vote of 60–25.
Although Caine has 34 years of military experience, he did not serve in any of the required positions.
The law provides that the president can waive the requirement if “the President determines such action is necessary in the national interest,” and he has apparently done so for Caine.
The politicization of the U.S. military by filling it with Trump loyalists is now, as Kendall writes, “indisputable.”
We're witnessing the removal of all of the guardrails, traffic signals, road maintenance crews. The highway patrols have been replaced by organized teams of highwaymen.
It'll get a lot worse before it gets better.
What we are witnessing is the devolution of the USA from a high-trust to low-trust business environment. "Low-trust business environment" is the euphemism we have used to describe other countries, where corruption is rampant. This is so sad to watch.
That environment isn't being outcompeted by better, more fair rules - it's just getting vandalized for a few people's gain, and creating risk for everyone else .
Came to nothing.
As far as I understand, the BRICS block does not actually exist. I mean, being member of it does not mean anything serious. There are no obligations, no agreements, no roadmaps. We might as well talk about a alliance of countries whose names begin with the letter "S"
Of course, countries like China are catching up anyway-- they're more than a billion people and very able, and of course, people are working hard to get out of this arrangement. I agree that it will be disruptive, but I think the crash has been in the making for years.
When US interest rates went from 1% to 4.5-5% without a drop in stock prices or a corresponding increasing in dividends I could only interpret that as pure irrationality, and even now companies like Tesla still have P/E ratios of 133.54 whereas excellent firms in the same business-- Volkswagen and Toyota have P/E ratios 3.24 and 6.21 respectively. I'm surprised it still hasn't gone through the floor. The traders by trading at these prices are implicitly assuming interest rates will go back to <1% without any drop in earnings, and that won't happen.
The Dow crashed from ~36k to ~28k in less than a year, and that decrease in value doesn't account for inflation. Adjusting for inflation I don't think the markets have actually fully reached their late 2021 peak.
s/forces other powers/makes other powers want to/
s/force US/make US want to/
France and Britain alone used to be able to defend trade routes. I don't think it's a huge expense. It really is good for essentially everyone aside from the US itself, once the disruption is over. Obviously we'll have some kind of crash though, but I think that was inevitable with or without this.
That was a different world. France and Britain today have nowhere the kind of force projection the USA does, via its military bases and aircraft carriers.
The US probably wasn't in preventing an invasion of Egypt, but if not restrained I'm sure that Britain and France could have realised their objectives, and if they had had a continuous need to realise different changing objectives they would have retained more capability.
France and Britain used to be two of the world's largest imperial powers, and at any time you could plausibly claim France and Britain alone could defend global trade routes, Britain, at least, still was.
You really aren't making a case for it being an easy, cheap job.
I think these trade routes etc. will stop mattering rather soon. Batteries are coming and once that's here the oil trade's gone, and then you have no need to export things to get something to trade for it, so in a decade or so none of this will matter.
International trade will go from being mandatory to optional, and thus become much less important.
I am biased here, but I look forward to the next century of Pax Europa. This is the only way forward.
My fear is that Trump sees America's position eroding quickly relative to China before his eyes and decides to do something an order of magnitude dumber than anything he's done before.
However, in isolationist MAGA, the US military is just a jobs program. This is plain facts, is it not?
The other major power of the USA, post-WWII, was "soft power." That has now been cancelled. So, I am really not sure what is happening.
I once thought that "may you live in interesting times" was a blessing. I now believe that this saying is a curse.
I think most voters think like me “I still prefer Trump to a leftist government”:
- Was there any need to be so extreme in terms of wokeness on the left? I am directly threatened by their program. Was there really any need to go for such a degree of revolution, ensuring everyone sensical would vote Trump? Could the left imagine being a little more democratic and making a few more concessions towards… omg, white males? Is it such a bane? It’s concessions for white males, or we vote for Trump, so did the left win anything with their scorched earth policy?
- It is true that savings needed to be done. The left refused to do any, and went to raise the public programs, reaching a few trillion debt per semester. At one point this has to stop, and the left ain’t gonna stop by itself, so the left provokes the people into voting for the only one who will stop public spending and, yes, he comes in, and has the bad role of taking the US to the cleaners. You will say “It doesn’t even save money” and whatsnot, but would the left have saved the money by themselves? No. Never. So someone else came in and saved for them.
This entire movement is a reactionary movement to the left. The left makes no concessions. So both sides go for a scorched earth policy.
What have we learned? What have we won, on either sides?
Do we agree that, staying closed-minded as they are, the left will resume public spendings by the trillions the moment they step into power? Do we agree that the left is a direct threat to meritocracy, stability of government, men in marriage, men at work, a direct threat to men’s financial stability, and that no-one on the left cares even a little what others-than-them feel?
I am not from the US, I am originally from Latin America. I am considered a “white male” there. I am now living in Europe as I am a dual citizen. This kind of position is interesting to me. What is so bad about being a white male in the USA at the moment?
I’d like to elaborate further, but I want to engage in an honest conversation so I would like to hear your opinion.
I don’t support extreme right or their hate but it looked a lot like categorical hate against my “kind” that I didn’t have part in choosing.
What got me writing is that is debt actually so bad or is it like leveraged investment? If US would have chosen a bit more professional leader capable to at least maintain the position in world economy, the debt wouldn’t likely ever have to be paid off.
Rest assured you are not. But this could turn out to be true, maybe in a very minor way, the moment your resentment towards this straw man becomes the main driver of your political views.
Americans literally thought that this extremely easy to bribe, criminal, serial adulterer, whose is most likely trying to undermine your constitution (I expect all you 2nd amendment supporters to stop touting that) was a reasonable choice.
The problem with it is that we delegate the duties towards our fellow citizens to the talking heads on TV or in our algorithmic feeds and wash our hands on it—I say “we” because it has been happening in basically every country at this point.
If democracy has failed, as some people love to say, it was not because it was supposed to fail, but because politicians have successfully managed to replace it by the current series of popularity contests we have in place.
I’m only suggesting that you deal with the feelings people are having. Which were ignored. They’re right about that.
BTW, I don’t think Joe Rogan is as bad as people think he is. All you democrats should have gone on his show.
I agree that the left should address young men’s struggles, namely the working class, but maybe not in the same sense you are implying. They are as responsible for their own political choices as anyone else.
[P.S.: Am I not from the US. How could I be a Democrat?]
I noticed that someone in America said so, but the US had been extreme, in all ways, for many years and no sane person takes the stuff coming from there as gospel.
I am not responsible for 'all the world’s injustices', and nobody had tried to make me. Maybe if I spend some time on YouTube I can find someone at an American college thinking so, or a right-wing podcast saying that people think so about me. But that is not the mainstream here.
And your woke argument is a pure strawman. What were those extreme positions by Kamala Harris?
eastbound> We need Trump because the economy is in the shitter
fabian2k> He's actually making it worse
eastbound> Well, the other side wouldn't have made it better
How do you get to have it both ways -- the economy is important enough that we need Trump, but Trump is more important despite ruining it?
Could you please explain what that threat is exactly, and what kind of “concessions to white males” you would have in mind?
- AOC, known as “the squad” (!), has claimed the Congress has too many white males. President Macron said the same about the US tech sector, and he’s not even part of the extremists, so this issue permeates society. Basically everyone says white men should be fewer of them. This is a direct threat.
- Feminism was supposed to give women more place at work and give family a better representation of both genders at home. What happened: Men can’t apply for some jobs anymore; while men are assumed to not merit to see the children by default at home. This has been going on since the 1980 in every developed country, moreso in France and US, a little less in Sweden. Judges and lawyer family courts are often 100%-women (80.2% in the profession).
- We helped women when they were 38% of the university students. But they crossed the 50% in 1990. Men now represent 39% of university students. Do we help them? No, we drop help programs. And Sweden also dropped equality programs the moment men were in need.
This is what various groups have been militanting for years, but they were harassed into submission by the left (from Facebook’s pro-left censorship at the time, to directly burning their cars or killing their dogs, and of course cancelling conference centers for men support groups which they presented as extremists - which is true, men are angry).
How is Trump helping?
- His program basis is based on a meritocratic econonic theory (that does not favour women, which is all the left complains about), but, granted, elected presidents generally implement another program, and Trump isn’t helping much,
- Men thrive in both meritocracies and in the wilderness/lawlessness, because they work more. To this, Trump has choosen the latter. The more economic crisis there is is, the weaker the government, and the more women will need men. Given the left’s program is “let’s take men’s/white’s people money”, the scorched earth is the best situation.
Granted, it would be nicer if leftists didn’t hate white men’s guts so much that they could listen to them when they make reasonable demands such as equity in family courts or meritocracy at the workplace. Barring being sensible…
It is safe to say that men are ~50% of any country's demographics. If you find any position of power and prestige where they are over-represented, it is safe to assume that there is an imbalance. People will come up with excuses for such imbalance, but one cannot deny that there is such an imbalance there.
Because as the other poster pointed out, if you push men out of the workplace and out of family life (by favoring custody for women) you just end up with a bunch of unemployed idle men, which is a recipe for revolution.
And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?
You got me, I did not express myself well. I should have said “working people”. I framed it as a women’s issue since you said that the solution to that would be forcing men to trade places with them.
Re: the fact that bringing up men’s issues is kind of taboo to the left, it seems more of a language problem. If you frame it as a “war on men”, that will turn people off. If you say: “look, there are many bright young guys who could be on college that are otherwise deciding to look for work because the economy is not so great”… Maybe people will listen.
Edit: maybe they will reply “EKSUSE MEE??? WHY NOT WOMEN???”. That is obnoxious, I get it. But do they have a point? If you think so, concede. If you do n’t think so, I would like to know more about it. That is what politics is about.
About 40% of male domestic violence victims who seek help are accused of being the abuser.
Completely coincidentally I'm sure, the federal law on domestic violence is called the "Violence Against Women Act", which furthers the bias that men can't be victims.
How would you improve the situation for male victims without making people on the left hate you?
The same people who say that "firemen" is sexist, will hypocritically say that the naming of the law isn't sexist.
The "Violence Against Women Act" is from 1994. Most statistics of that time pointed to a disproportionate amount of women being victims of domestic violence in comparison to men. I tried to find more recent statistics, but this is a very serious topic, so it deserves to be treated with more caution. Also, this is one of the reasons why I think it should not be used as a "war on men" talking point. Do we want to solve the darn problem or use it as a weapon against political opponents?
The double standard is very visible. Maybe you should just admit that the left is blatantly the "party of women's interests" and give up on gaining men's votes.
Pardon my laziness, but this is the best graph I could find on the reduction of workplace-related injuries: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Info...
This policy was very effective, in the first place. I could eyeball a 70% reduction in the period between 1972 and 2019.
Can it be reduced it even further? Probably.
Would I find it off-puting if any piece of legislation is eventually passed that addresses a hypothetical issue that is disproportionally faced by men and helps reduce it even further? Certainly not.
(I, for one, would approve of the "No More Balls Stuck in the Cogs Act".)
But the left will never prioritize men.
The left believes that any metric where women are worse off needs urgent attention, and any intervention must prioritize women.
But any metric where men are worse off can either be ignored, or fixed with an intervention that is either gender neutral, or preferably, prioritizes women again.
The left is the Party of Women.
If that doesn't work, which I believe is highly unlikely, maybe try incorporating elements of speech as those found in this right-wing publication, the World Socialist Web Site: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/27/hefl-f27.html
If the majority of work fatalities were women, we'd be screaming from the rooftops that "workplaces are unsafe for women"
I guess we can brush this one under the carpet, right? Nothing to see here. Workplace fatalities are a serious issue, but not so serious to you that it is worth bridging that gap. Maybe I’m wrong. Feel free to correct me if that is the case.
On the other hand, I acknowledge that men are disproportionately affected by this issue and that it deserves serious attention from both left and right. I would wholeheartedly support their demand of better working conditions from their employers and representatives, and advise them to contact the media so that the general public can be informed of that and, who knows, maybe support unionization if their demands are not met. Do you think this is a reasonable stance, or do you see any problems with that?
We could start with the resources we have already found on the Internet. I can pay for the domain if you are interested.
Well, obviously not. But there is always the caveat that suggesting government providing adequate child care to working women is communism of whatever. Is it feasible to have some compromise here?
> And if 50/50 is the goal, where is the government push for more men in places where they're underrepresented, like university students, nurses, teachers?
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate ask if young men do really care about it. Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
You see this is the bias on the left, that everything must be framed as "for women". If the childcare is only for "working women", will a single dad not be able to access it?
Why not government providing adequate child care to working people?
> Why not contact your local representative and explain the issue in an articulate manner?
I do, but your have to admit there is a chilling effect in left wing spaces where openly supporting men's issues makes you very unpopular.
So, to put a finer point on it - you decided that aiming to destroy the United States, and the Pax Americana underlying western civilization, was an appropriate response because AOC and Macron (who represent "everyone", in your apparent media diet) hurt your feelings. As a fellow man, this is just pathetic and entitled.
There have always been groups in society you cannot criticize. There has always been groupthink bullshit that you just smile and nod, and then later share your real thoughts with your trusted close friends. The growing prevalence of talking about men's rights issues was the painstaking path to them getting better - there are some pretty harsh biological reasons why custody courts are slanted towards women, right? If you really wanted to phrase this in terms of "men", then maybe you needed to listen to your fellow wiser men telling you to hold your nose and vote conservative/democrat instead of lashing out with histrionic destruction. Alas.
The large scale facts are that under the previous administration we had working relationships with our allies, mostly functional executive agencies (aka law enforcement), and the US (ie USD) was seen as a source of stability. Meanwhile the current administration's actions are indistinguishable from a foreign power doing its best to destroy our country - we are now isolated from our allies (and even seen as hostile!), the ideal of rule of law has been replaced by brazenly corrupt rule by law, and we're staring down dedollarization.
Smarten up, quick.
Bottom line is, people see goals / intentions differently, especially in politics!
And your reasonable demands...are you seriously at a workplace where meritocracy is lived? Ever? Out of the many different non-meritocratic factors that come into play in a workplace, being male certainly was never in the top 10 for me. If anything it was an advantage. I'm sorry if you had different experiences. It's not true, where I live, that men can't apply for certain jobs, and I doubt that is the reality for you. The usual term is "everything else equal, a female candidate will be preferred", which is just an encouragement to women to apply. If you want the male candidate, you always find a reason that he is not equal to the female applicant. So if you have the feeling that you didn't get a job because you are male - perhaps it was because the female candidate was better.
And those recurring "leftist", "leftism" references make your statements a bit biased. The time to put everything in left and right categories is somewhat last century. It's all more complicated than that. Nobody hates you because your male and white. But it sure sounds a bit whiny what you are complaining about - imagine you'd be black and female, you really think you would be in a better position, you would have an advantage then? Come on.
Well, when you get that basic of a fact wrong,...
The left’s arguments are unfortunately a collection of your argument: Refuting entirely-developed speeches because of a single sentence missing one word.
To be honest, this thread has shown what weak fragile egos some white men have. So your kind has had it easy for centuries. Yeah, probably the rhetoric that's made you "the enemy" is really dumb (hey it poisoned the mind of the richest man in the world, for one), but what do you expect, mollycoddling?
Hah, maybe the whole (white) world should have a truth-and-reconciliation committee, where men are invited to discuss their privilege, and what can be changed to make an equal world. (Actually not just white, men all over the world have had this tyranny. Then again maybe it's just the animal/biological nature that we shouldn't just suppress). But even with "committee", there'll be weak egos screaming about the tyranny against them. A bit like states wanting to hide away the civil war from their education, or not even allowing discussion about systemic racism or "critical race theory" (uh oh sorry if that triggers you, if I were mocking you I'd call you a snowflake now).
*when the draft is all women, but men are allowed to serve voluntarily
Yeah if I'm looking for a caretaker for my child, a male candidate would also make me go "Huh, interesting". Women have the advantage for this job, and men have it for the CEO job, I wonder which job is more powerful in the world (if we don't pull out a philosophical idea of "powerful"...).
1. Men are on average physically stronger than women, and at their peak are physically stronger than is possible for any woman. This is more useful in a combat situation.
2. Women's bodies are specialized for pregnancy and childbirth. Without women providing this essential function, the next generation of humanity would not exist. By contrast, men are more disposable because all they do is provide the sperm.
A society where almost all women have been killed in battle cannot effectively repopulate, as there is a bottleneck of pregnancy: it is a long process that - excluding relatively rare cases of multiple births - requires one woman per newborn to conduct. A society where almost all men have been killed can repopulate much more rapidly, as it only takes a small number of men to fulfil the male reproductive role of providing sperm.
In fact the existence of sperm banks makes the widespread obliteration of males even less of a risk to the survival of humanity. Plus there is a promising subfield of stem cell research on growing viable sperm from female cells, which would remove the reliance upon males entirely.
So that’s America, no options if you want to vote for a liberal party or a conservative party.
Incorrect: This is an old argument from the left to pretend that US leftism isn’t very left.
Truth: The US government is in debt of 6 trillion per year, which makes it the most powerful government of the world. The right’s “Atlas Shrugged” vision is to have a very lean government, as in, weak and powerless as possible.
Conclusion: The American left wing proposes to build a government bigger than any socialist country in the world.
Correlation: Ironically, the leftists are often anti-war and they’d be much better defended if they supported defunding the US government to the point they couldn’t wage war outside their borders. The left should support Elon Musk ;) </s>
There is obviously multiple axises you can place the left/right on. If you want to define anyone who accepts debt as 'left', and thus the USA is leftish then... ok whatever floats your boat. Just be aware that the rest of the world sees concepts like universal healtcare and education as more important than how much debt you accept. Using debt to pay for a huge military and unsustainable low taxes is not a typical leftish view.
This is objectively not true of the right's actions. If you read Project 2025 or just look at the legislation/EOs passed, the right is currently trying to expand the power of the president to unprecedented levels. In addition, they're trying to undermine the checks and balances of the courts such that the government can make greater decisions faster.
This isn't a small government, it's teetering on fascism. The fascism analogs only grow greater when you here Trump speak of an enemy within, who must be eliminated. When he speaks as if he is the One True answer to every problem facing the US. Trump-ism is become more akin to a cult than a political platform, many people just following Trump because they view him a God. It's a bit spooky. It's very difficult to not draw parallels to fascist leaders of the past.
> Conclusion: The American left wing proposes to build a government bigger than any socialist country in the world.
Delusional, sorry. If you think the democrats, the ultra-capitalist right-leaning party, want to create a socialist country you are just delusional. I don't know how to help you there because it's just not in touch with reality.
There's, like, 2 representatives in all of the Democratic party who could maybe kind of be consider democratic-socialists. And there's a better chance of hell freezing over than those 2 convincing the other hundreds to go their way.
After a certain point, we have to come back down to Earth and acknowledge what is actually going on, instead of whatever we have allowed our minds to concoct.
I'm a white man. We already HAVE all the concessions. There's nothing left to give us. I mean, we're not gonna implement anti-racist stuff against white men because there does not exist any racism against white men. Ergo, that policy is defacto implemented.
White men also don't need DEI because we actually already have DEI. Studies show upwards of 50% increase in likelihood of being hired if you're white.
I mean, look at Trump's cabinet and admin. Full of white men... because they are white men. A lot of them are very unqualified.
> It is true that savings needed to be done.
This administration will only raise the deficit.
Also, the left at least admitted that taxes on the ultra-wealthy need to be raised. The Trump administration is continuing to raise YOUR taxes while cutting theirs. So, to recap: higher taxes for you, a greater deficit, and the programs will be cut. Wow, it's a lose-lose-lose! Almost impressive how shit conservative policy is.
> This entire movement is a reactionary movement to the left.
I applaud your honesty in admitting the reactionary nature of American conservatives.
However, you're incorrect in saying they're reacting to the left. They're not. They're reacting to a made-up version of the left. One formed and imagined through decades of conservative propaganda. One where the left are communists, baby eaters, and reptilians - not the reality, where the democratic party is a right-leaning ultra-capitalist party.
> Do we agree that, staying closed-minded as they are, the left will resume public spendings by the trillions the moment they step into power? Do we agree that the left is a direct threat to meritocracy, stability of government, men in marriage, men at work, a direct threat to men’s financial stability, and that no-one on the left cares even a little what others-than-them feel?
Uh, no.
This was like giving a crack addict a feedback loop which gives them more crack. Of course it was going to end badly.
We could discuss many possible points of inflection, but I don't want to dilute the undeniable power of the phrase "trust is efficient."
However we got here, whatever one's politics, you cannot argue against that simple phrase, and the tragedy of the loss.
___
just to give credit, it was https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=the_snooze who turned me on to these three words that have stuck in my head
Just to be clear as to what this means in politics on the ground... left or right, if you have a political position which disagrees with the biggest money, they will primary you. So, left or right, generally speaking, you only see politicians finally standing up for their morals when they are no longer up for election. The most obvious recent example of this is Mitch McConnell.
Eg, it would be perfectly fine to make insider trading legal by law. (And in fact, the definition of insider trading in the US differs a lot from the one used in France. So there are lots of things that have long been legal in the US that would have been illegal in France, without the economy collapsing.)
I agree that random enforcement of some regulations but not others depending on the whim of the executive is less than ideal.
Summary: people are already allowed to trade on inside information (in the US), if the person who officially owns the information is ok with that. The prohibition on insider trading in the US is about fiduciary duty to the owner of the information, not about protecting the general public.
Who knows, maybe we are in the middle of the resulting collapse now ;-)
Importantly, there's no guarantee it's actually going to get better. We like to pretend that human existence has some trajectory towards "justice" or "prosperity". I don't think that impulse does us justice.
Stalin/Lenin could have won. Hitler could have won, Napoleon could have conquered and held. It could just get worse.
I always find it so surprising how people really do believe individuals have any real power despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
It's a capitalist society so capital is power. Doesn't get simpler than that. Voting is the circus to distract us so we don't realize how much we're being exploited, while giving a sense of agency that simply does not exist.
We can choose but they pick the choices we have.
And now, apparently, everyone involved with it had always been against it.
If they're getting away with it, they'll do it again. The tariffs were paused for 90 days. The plan is to run the same playbook in 90 days.
Who cares if someone at the WH does insider trading? In a transparent system people would be able to trace back every transaction and realize something is brewing and they could act accordingly.
Concretely, what are you thinking of here?
In theory of course, them being blatantly and obviously corrupt would hurt them at the ballot box. In practice, this is not really something at moves the needle in American politics.
They're a derivative, so options of equities are equities and I guess options of commodities are commodities
All it needs is some kind of emergency, genuine, imaginary or self-inflicted, and ‘Oh no, we can’t possibly hold elections until our time of national crisis is over.’
I'm happy to bet. What odds to do you offer?
https://apnews.com/article/congress-save-act-citizenship-vot...
As your article discusses, requiring that proof means paperwork, paperwork some people might not have (e.g. wives who changed their names).
For example in the UK, the Windrush scandal 1) deported British subjects because the government made irrational demands for documents to prove that they're citizens.
They might not even need an excuse. They could just not hold elections and say "what are you going to do about it?"
You need to lay off the MAGA talking points.
Nobody is a strong word. Lots of people want elections, especially in wartime. And lots of other people don't want elections.
But it doesn't matter: the constitution of Ukraine doesn't allow elections during wartime.
I think by default constitutional rules should be followed, unless there are very good reasons not to.
Russia's takeover of Crimea in 2014 was almost as 'peaceful' as the German takeover of the Sudetenland in the 1930s.
All in all, my comment is just a convoluted way that sometimes the price to pay for peace is too high.
In addition, there's also pre-commitments that make everything more complicated: as a potential victim of invasion, you might want to pre-commit to defending long beyond any reasonable threshold, in the hopes that this will deter invasion. Sometimes your bluff gets called, and then you need to actually fight to maintain your credibility.
Compare mutual assured destruction in nuclear war: nuking Moscow in retaliation for the Soviets nuking New York isn't going to bring anyone back from the dead. But it's what you pre-commit to in order to deter the bombing of New York in the first place.
But I can very well believe that the consensus is virtually unanimous.
THE GOVERNMENT doesn't want elections in wartime. Most people want.
>not least because polling stations become targets.
I think this is pure gaslighting. If we are talking about Ukraine, Putin is one of the main supporters of holding elections there. And almost certainly not because he wants to bomb some polling stations, but because he is confident that people will vote for a candidate who will de-facto offer to surrender, and not for Zelensky with his busifications.
Because he will interfere, like he has across Europe. He is a tyrant and has only his own interests at heart.
All major political factions oppose holding elections now, because they expect Zelenskyy's popularity to fade after the war ends and believe their candidates will have better chances then.
Well, that, and also the constitution doesn't allow election during wartime.
Totally outrageous concern.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5159951-ukraine-pre...
Zelensky is not seizing power. Elections suspended during active, home-turf wartime is normal.
Or maybe just all future times: the Court has indicated that the power may be exercised at any time after [an offense’s] commission,8 reflecting that the President may not preemptively immunize future criminal conduct.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...
He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...
To make 2.5 billion just from holdings they must have had stock holdings of 35 billion. Then the next day they lost a lot more than that. I doubt it very, very much.
"Rules for thee not for me."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-stocks-t...
So someone, somewhere, knew something before everyone else.
[1] https://www.404media.co/benzinga-news-service-that-falsely-r...
Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)
The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.
I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique before any market-shifting news event coming out of the government in recent decades. The "sort" of transaction is irrelevant except that it's risky and thus relatively low volume normally.
It did not established that. If it was so unique, the market would have reacted to this trade (before the news).
I said it happens in individual stock cases, but very few people / places that control major market moving news leak - and when they do they investigate the hell out of it.
Imagine if this happened 20 minutes before Jerome Powell unexpectedly dropped interest rates?
This is standard practice, it was simply the marketmaker hedging its position after just having sold those $2.5 million call options.
The math checks out; at 85 cent per piece, those were 2.94 million call options. At 9 above the spot the delta was less than one so I guess you'd need to buy slightly above 2 million shares to hedge your delta. The normal SPY trades would have made up for the remainder of the 2.75 million volume.
/klĕp-tŏk′rə-sē/ noun
A government characterized by rampant greed and corruption.
Surely it will only take a few more rounds of pump and dumping the entire US economy for basically every country to label the US the same, and move away from US bonds and the US dollar as reserve currency. It just won’t be stable enough with all these antics.
When it happens I just hope trump won’t use it as justification for war.
> My previous post highlighted a striking example: how a single $2.5 million options position turned into $70 million in under an hour. But focusing solely on that trade risks missing the larger picture. What we actually saw was widespread activity. Numerous sophisticated traders carefully placing positions across several strike prices ($504, $505, $507, $509) in SPY as well as similar trades in QQQ.
> The pattern wasn't limited to a single trade or strike price. It was a coordinated wave of positions, all established within a critical half-hour window before the news broke.
> Imagine someone purchasing thousands of lottery tickets with a specific number combination just moments before those exact numbers are drawn.
https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...
It's treason what they did, treason on their principles. All this in times when it was supposedly "Main Street" turn.
Apparently most of them are just temporarily embarrassed billionaires.
I believe he's right, but would just like some more proof that it's really extraordinarily rare to place such a big bets, especially on 0DTEs (which I believe did not exist in 2008).
This culminated in Trump v. United States [1] where unelected partisans simply invented presidential immunity completely out of thin air. That means there are absolutely no possible legal repercussions for any of this. None. And even if there were, the agencies in charge of enforcing it have either been gutted or they've been subverted by putting a sycophantic lackey in charge.
This is the new kleptocracy we live in. Nobody is coming to save us. The supposed political opposition (ie the Democratic Party) is nothing more than feckless controlled opposition who are more interested in defending US imperialism than they are in winning elections.
Things are only going to get worse.
The only people that can save it are regular people standing up and taking action.
»This Is What Insider Trading Looks Like«
https://data-and-politics.ghost.io/this-is-what-insider-trad...
That's called freedom my friends.
"The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory— in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal.
Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false."
https://beatofhawaii.com/why-these-hawaii-travelers-were-jai...
- held for an indefinite time without due process and information what you did wrong
- stripped naked and spilled with cold water
- potentially worse, but that depends entirely on the way things are developing on a day-by-day basis
And if someone thinks that won't happen to them because they come from a western country and have a low eumelanin pigmentation level, recent examples show that this does not matter¹. Remember ICE also appears to want to police "illegal ideas" at the border now².
These arbitrary arrests, a disregard for the Rule of Law and the valuation of loyalty to the cause over predictable consequences fit the despotic style that is encouraged in the US from the top down lately. The world would be wise not continue betting all their cards on a crazy horse.
¹: Germany, Feb 2025 – Tourist held 16 days at border, deported without clear reason. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-immigration-detaining-europe... UK, Mar 2025 – Backpacker held 3 weeks at Canada border, no charges. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Germany, Mar 2025 – Visitor held 45 days under Visa Waiver, unclear why. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-detention-of-european... Canada, Mar 2025 – Woman with valid visa held 12 days at border. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-immigration-detaining-europe... UK, Mar 2025 – Punk band denied entry, detained at LAX. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Germany, Mar 2025 – Green card holder detained at Boston airport. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/tourism-trum... Multiple, Mar 2025 – ICE arrested 48 in NM; cause/details unclear. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-mystery-of-ices-...
²: ICE posted a very "unfortunate" marketing picture recently: https://www.newsweek.com/ice-illegal-ideas-border-security-s...
I grew up in a tourism country and the number one rule of tourism is that if you want people to come hospitality goes a long way. A mad-king-leader calling them freeloaders and quoting Napoleon with "He who saves his country, violates no law" and a cult like followership doesn't exactly instill confidence that your rights will be respected when you go there.
The current administration seems to be downright hostile to everybody who isn't a US citizen even if we'd just come to spend our money in the US. Pair that with a lack of basic oversight over your cops/TSA-agents/whatever and suddenly the US just isn't as attractive any more.
Don't get me wrong, I find the US fascinating, but given I am in the middle of Europe, I have many destinations with a friendlier atmosphere and a more reliable political leadership to chose from.
Take China for example. People do criticize the government online all the time. It's just that criticism magically disappears before it reaches critical mass. Generally China does not throw people (Han Chinese, minorities are different) into gulag for posting against the government. They are just constantly censoring and shaping the discussion. Only after they can't contain something they step up. Even then, there is often a phone call first. They try to be efficient.
People have rebel fantasy that US tuns into fascist dictatorship. What really happens is that US turns into illiberal democracy like Hungary. There is constant headwind going against the government or voicing your opinion, you don't get fair treatment and opportunities. Most people just stop resisting when it's somewhat inconvenient. You can still post anything but it is drowned by algorithms.
And if there is a significant difference, what stops one becoming the other?
In Russia the elections actually are rigged and China doesn't have elections so they are both dictatorships.
Granted the line between them is fuzzy so it's more helpful to think of it as a spectrum.
Illiberal democracy (aka electoral authoritarianism, competitive authoritarianism, or soft authoritarianism) is a system with democratic institutions that don't work properly. Opposition can still win but it's not a fair game.
>And if there is a significant difference, what stops one becoming the other?
People. For example, Ukraine was illiberal democracy and Orange Revolution 2004 changed that. Poland was slipping badly but 2023 Polish protests changed things.
Putin started with illiberal democracy and slipped into pure authoritarian eventually, because Russians can't get their shit together.
> "If Mahmoud can be targeted in this way, simply for speaking out for Palestinians and exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech, this can happen to anyone over any issue the Trump administration dislikes," said Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil's attorneys.
He's currently in Louisiana prison it says which means yes, he's subject to forced prison labor.
https://www.laaclu.org/en/press-releases/aclu-report-finds-i...
People buy options all the time, sometimes without any insider information, people buy options that happen to just perfectly line up with major market moving events.
Look at 9/11, there were several trades made right before the planes hit that paid out big time. The SEC investigated and found no evidence of insider information.
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/hearings/hearing1/witnes...
If the price had stayed flat or dropped, they would of course still have the $2.5M.
The precision makes it look a lot like a crime, as trading on information that's not publicly available is illegal.
Owning the stock is a specific lower risk strategy called a covered call.
Whoever shorted those calls made some money in the contracts, but they were going to lose money anyway the moment of the announcement.
But why not earlier in the day? Why this unique volume spike then? The one $2.5M is just a sample trade, part of a historic spike.
No one's jumping to conclusions, but it should trigger an investigation.
Why? A secretary or janitor or a intern could also be an insider. Or are they No True Scotsmen?
I thought the article itself and comments here presume bad faith on behalf of the highest ranking officials.
About the specifics we have here:
It's sad that the highest ranking officials are willing to corrupt themselves over a few million here or there. (And that's already pretty high by corruption standards. Usually you here of even much lower bribes etc being enough.)
To be pithy: I'm not angry that you can buy officials and politicians. I'm angry that the price is so low.
0 day - means it's a win big or loose 2.5M on a single day move.
Well, if it was insider trading, Trump and his billionaire friends wouldn't invest just 2.5 million. That's a meager sum for the very wealthy.
Maybe they've even done insider trading but in ways that weren't so obvious.
There is no need for scientists to prove we’re living inside a simulation, this whole global turn based strategy financial game, affecting our lives, is the proof that someone is having a laugh at/with us ;-)
All I know and have in my life is thanks to public funding. Social Democracy works and is good for business too. A state with little financial regulation in the end also has less power and control sum total.
Since the southern US basically survives off slave laborers with no paperwork and giving any normal human decency to those people would probably lower the Murican standard of living I have low hopes for change. Here in the EU we screwed ourselves too haha. No one really looks out for the little guy anymore.
There is a common believe that humans would never be generous, altruistic without a State forcing them. And that’s actually quite the opposite. Humankind would have never made it if that was the case. You can observe it clearly still in lots of societies populating earth, specially the poorest ones without public services.
It’s actually the unconditional access to public services that has incentivized the individuality of our society nowadays. If I’m already supported by the State why should I make any effort towards my society? In the past without public services, interaction with your local community was a must.
But it’s also a problem as a donor or supporter: how can I support or donate to any cause if the State is already taxing 50% of my wealth and I have barely any money to buy a house?
Eu-person: how? (Pleas stay relevant to your whole comment).
All these worthless paperless money as you call it are precisely also instruments for companies and individuals to gain some economical stability during uncertain times by buying contracts and shifting the risk to someone else that has either more financial means or has worked to have a better view of future conditions.
So as an example, your medical insurer and your car insurer know pretty well the odds of you needing either medical treatment or suffering some type of car accident. And because they also have the financial means to risk being wrong, they offer you an insurance, because in the aggregated number they are usually right in their predictions.
How many physicians have been able to get rich from learning a CEO will be out of commission? In that case, I'm not even sure whether it would be considered insider trading.
How does one even go about accusing someone of insider trading? The illegality sounds pretty unenforceable.
Do you actually have an answer to that? Or are you just throwing out an unanswerable question as some form of “gotcha”?
Now I’m actually curious. There aren’t _that_ many publicly traded companies; only about 4,000 according to Google. A little over 9,000 IPOs since 1980 [0]. The number of companies where the CEO being “out of commission” on such a short timescale would generate “rich” (to me, in this scenario, >$5 million) levels of ROI has to be pretty low up. Probably not even most of the Fortune 100. Then the number of doctors who have that info and are going to act on it is a smaller fraction. Then the three have to match (command that fits + ill CEO + trading physician). Do you think it’s over 10? 25?
0. https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPO-Statistics....
But most businesses don't need such large capital injections anyway. They can grow organically, and there's very little reason to sell a profitable company. Although it does happen, of course, Google being a prime example, having gone public when already profitable.
"The sample is composed of the IPOs of U.S.-based companies with an offer price of at least $5.00 and listed on the NYSE (excluding NYSE American and NYSE MKT issues after the merger in 2008) or Nasdaq (excluding Nasdaq small cap issues before October 2005 and, after Sept. 2005, Nasdaq capital market issues), excluding ADRs, unit offers, SPACs, closed-end funds, REITs, partnerships, banks and S&Ls, and stocks not listed on CRSP (CRSP includes Amex, NYSE, and NASDAQ stocks)"
You can switch up the doctor and CEO patient for anything else. Bankers, lenders, family friends, former professors ... An unbounded number of humans that can come into contact with useful info to trade on. What do we think are the magical constraints that prevent them from doing so? Corporate etiquette?
The ROI will obviously be a function of what information is passed. But I think that I'm more interested in understanding how often it happens rather than that any one case is "low ROI". It is interesting to consider whether it's the ROI threshold that should philosophically make/not make something insider trading.
That would be like saying there are 300 million peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches eaten a year because that’s the total number of sandwiches made in a year. https://www.ezcater.com/lunchrush/office/state-of-the-sandwi...
> Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;
And there are much more situations that will influence stock prices than a company changing its CEO. Those situations can be both internal and external to a company.
So I think we potentially have thousands or tens of thousands of people who learn information that make them rich if they act quickly. And even that has a multiplying factor since those people have friends and family.
"Hey Bill, wanna make a quick buck? As soon as market opens buy XYZ. You don't know it from me and I didn't call you today."
Ok, but I was responding to a specific claim from the parent comment specifically mentioning physicians.
For example, imagine you are working for Warren Buffet and you learn that he has quietly bought some stocks and next weeks he's going to announce that. Assume that this announcement will reliably make the stock trade up. If you trade on that information, that's insider trading by US laws.
However, now imagine that you are Warren Buffet. You just quietly bought some stock, and you plan to announce that fact next week. If you trade on that information about your intentions, that's not insider trading by US law: you are allowed to trade on your own private intentions and information.
Notice that from the point of view of the anonymous counter party trading with you on the stock exchange, both situations look exactly the same.
That's an illustration that insider trading law in the US is not supposed to protect the public. (At least not originally.) So making insider trading legal in the US wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Of course, IANAL applies. The above explanation is mostly paraphrased from Matt Levine's Money Stuff.
Some economists suggest that insider trading is good for public markets, because it disseminates information. (However fiduciary duties would still apply. But they would only allow the company to sue the vice president who told her golf buddy about the upcoming earnings, but could not sue the golf buddy.)
From [0]: >Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.
So it _kinda_ is supposed to protect the public.
0. https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
Eh? If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own? How can you possibly claim there is no difference?
You might as well say: imagine you secretly give another country nuclear weapons, and assume that that country plans to use them. Now imagine you plan to use them for the same purpose yourself. From the viewpoint of the public, the situation is exactly the same. So nuclear proliferation wouldn't make the general public any worse off.
Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
Let me be more explicit: Warren Buffett usually doesn't physically execute his own trades. So the only difference between the two scenarios I outlined is that in the second one Warren Buffett tells you (as his employee) to trade. In the first one, you trade without him telling you to do so.
But it's the same person doing the trades in either scenario.
> Or imagine the president picks a random person by lottery every day to run the country while he goes to play golf. The president can take the same actions himself, so from the standpoint of the general public, nobody would be worse off.
Sortition might actually be a good idea.
Fiduciary duty is an important concept in any case, yes.
>> If nothing else, doesn't it magnify the public's risk beyond whatever impact Buffet could have on his own?
I am saying that when you let others pull the same trick in addition to Buffet himself, they can now bring their own additional funds to play with -- meaning they can make more trades and cause even more damage than Buffet could inflict on his own. This clearly enlarges the blast radius and allows more harm to the public than Buffet could cause with his own funds. It is ludicrous to close your eyes and suggest the situation is no different, just like it is by suggesting that there's no difference between one country having nukes vs. N of them having them.
Heck, the fact that Warren Buffet is used as the example here instead of some random John Doe makes it clear how intentionally ridiculous the example is: for this to even pass the laugh test and obscure the reality of the situation, you have to pick one of richest people of all time, so that even aggregating a thousand other random strangers' funds together would still miss his purchasing power by multiple orders of magnitude.
Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?
Buffett is not inflicting damage on anyone by trading on his intentions. Neither would anyone else.
Also: the typical 'insider' in insider trading cases has far less budget to bring to bear than the typical principal. Eg Warren Buffett (and Berkshire Hathaway) are richer than Warren Buffett's assistant.
Also: 'insider trading' is perfectly legal for commodities and foreign exchange, and the markets in these work perfectly well.
> Why don't you start with someone poor instead of Buffet, then add Buffet to the equation, then try to claim that bringing the billionaire into the equation makes no difference, rather than the other way around?
I'm very poor compared to Warren Buffett. If Warren Buffett wanted to trade on any information I held, I'm very sure we could work out a deal.
Due to insider trading rules being problematic, sometimes more headache than benefit, the UK FCA is now allowing new stock market to launch where insider trading is legal.
Much of it is data analysis. My favorite examples of this are actual hacks - once foothold is established instead of encrypting & ransoming, the attacker just listens to the CEO/CFO. One hacked a law firm that handled some sizable mergers.
Personal tangent: Once had an opportunity to insider trade on a particular huge aerospace company. Playing a squad-based PvE game, matchmade into a team with 3 real-life friends at said company who chatted on in-game voice comms about their day, talking about court cases and senate hearings, and later panicked when they realized I could hear it all. They were nice guys, and I assured them that I wouldn't misuse what I overheard - I don't work in a relevant industry, and my investments do just fine without an illegal edge (plus I know Matt Levine's Laws of Insider Trading #1: Don't).
Because it maybe up a bit or down a bit, but that's all going to measured relative to assumptions the market has and those assumptions aren't public either.
This could lead to a lot of investment in the U.S. being diverted elsewhere to markets that have some kind of regulation to prevent abuse.
+There are some non-gambling reasons for stock options trading, akin to commodities options being used to reduce risks in farming.
https://unusualwhales.substack.com/p/unusual-options-trading...
And looking at the options flow, it was billions across all the unusual 0DTE trades.
Elect a felon, you get felonies.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
> If the trades hadn’t worked out, the losses would have been swift and total. Zero-day options don’t forgive bad timing. The entire $2.5 million could have evaporated by the close of trading. Even with SPY shares, any unexpected reversal would have meant millions in losses.
This has exactly been Taleb’s strategy. Buy option where the writeoff is small when wrong and the payoff huge when correct. As described in the post, the ratio was 1 to 25. Also it was likely that the market would go through huge shifts because the policy is so unpredictable.
So it is not impossible that someone figured that it would be possible to just buy these calls for the whole month. As long as one was a hit, the trade would not make a loss. And given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month. These short option bets are truly not such strange ehm options in these volatile times.
So I would like some data about whether similar options were bought on other days in similar volumes.
Having said that, I do find the evidence very strong and it’s reasonable to assume that this was insider trading. I personally suspect someone at JPM or Ackman. They said they “convinced” Trump so maybe Trump said in a meeting that it would probably happen and they immediately bought the calls.
The option to buy at 2.5m was not an obligation to do so
And it's bullshit that you can reliably make money of such low probability options. Even if you do, you never put $2.5 million on something with a huge probability of ending in a complete loss, these deep out of the money options are essentially lottery tickets.
I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.
Nassim Taleb: "I was effectively short volatility. [...] I would have been harmed by small movements. I was set up to be harmed by small movement and gain if the move continues to something very large." [1]
He also described in one of his books that this strategy works because on most days you will lose money, and most people psychologically don't like that. But you have to ignore that and keep betting until you suddenly make a lot of money.
In case you don't know Taleb and would like to point out that he probably is a fraud, please note that his books and articles have been cited 39946 times according to Google Scholar. See also his Wikipedia [2]. Although I am aware that these are all popularity-based metrics, I unfortunately don't have a better metric available. I invite you to read his books for yourself and make your own decision on his credibility.
> I do buy slightly OTM options and it's barely profitable and even so I think mostly out of pure luck. No way would someone have done this trade without inside info.
Okay if the discussion is whether this particular trade was unlikely I can agree, but your "No way" makes no sense to me.
Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day, rather than anything profound regarding option pricing, unless I am missing something. Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.
Now that you say it could be that he misspoke indeed.
> Taleb's point seems more to be that he saw a mispricing and traded on it one day
Okay so Taleb was literally an "option trader" as in he traded one option on one day in his life?
> Anyway, it has little to do with what's being said in the article.
How is Taleb, who is an option trader and who has written about options trading for years, not related to an article on an options trade?
I should be clear that what you seem to think ties these together, i.e:
> given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month.
I don't actually believe to be true. It's not like these options aren't being priced somewhat accurately. There could be insanely high volatility and all that needs to happen is for the price to go up instead of down for none of your options to "hit."
The volumes are there for all to see and the answer is no.
I'm surprised if they would let the trades go through at all once they know the secret.
he actually posted at 1:18. not that there is nothing to see here, but it would help the credibility if the article was accurate
Due to many factors (mostly around the crash that was in full swing, and a bond market that was illiquid and melting down), this was a key moment around which a huge amount of position management happened.
I'm not at all saying that there shouldn't be extensive investigation around insider trading around the Trump announcement. There obviously should be. And I'm also not saying that a big block of calls wouldn't fit the bill for that. It would (although it begs the question about the actor being so brazen. There would be countless ways to hide the bet more effectively while still producing insane profit).
What I am saying is that it's ridiculous to me that there's no discussion about the bond auction! First of all you can't just look at a block of option contracts independently many of them are part of wider trade structures. Those call options could have just been hedging short portfolio deltas, or be part of any number of strategies. The timing does signify that you ever executed the trade, ill intentioned or not, was aware of bond auction mechanics.
So you're starting to run into some Occam's razor territory here. Either the participant was sophisticated enough to understand the volume surge around bond auction data releases yet chose to do an incredibly boneheaded bet (instead of some sort of more cloaked relative value trade that would make 10x as well, or just making a bet on something slightly less obvious like credit spreads or ETFs that are trade-war exposed, etc), or the participant was making a clumsy obvious swing for the fences, yet lucked into to the minute perfect timing to cloak the transaction. Meanwhile there is the simplest answer which is just that the position was part of the huge wave of trading around the bond auction results.
I'd welcome the investigation, but it's pretty shocking to me that I'm seeing so much discussion around this without these points being brought up!
I manage a portfolio and also put large blocks of options that benefit from market rallies on at exactly the same time. That's because Bond volatility was sky high, and once the results came in, one of the likely outcomes is a huge volatility crush. That means that if you have positions that you've been holding from executing off during the crisis due to elevated volatility, and have a view that the market is nearing the end of capitulation (all of the indicators that most fear, like liquidations, fear/greed index tanking, positioning being bearish, are huge bullish signals to the trading world), then in order to dodge the binary event risk you may want to re-add exposure at that moment. Readings from prime broker reports show that institutional participants were extremely low in positioning, so the risk that would need to be hedged for many would have been upside risk. If someone wants to hedge their upside risk but doesn't want to actively move out of their bearish/locked down positions during the crisis, they may well use options.
(Devil's advocate argument concluded)
Why would someone hedge with 0DTE options as opposed to normal options?
I’m no longer in that space, but I’d assume the OOTM strikes are less liquid than normal options, with higher theta as well. That looks like a very expensive hedge.
What kind of position would be hedged with these options that couldn’t be hedged with normal options?
I’d assume the theta would be higher for 0dte? With normal options you could just roll out of them the next day. I guess you would be crossing 2 bid ask spreads, but is that more expensive than the theta decay?
I'm curious if you could evaluate an AI response from Perplexity. I asked it to analyze your comment (https://www.perplexity.ai/search/summarize-https-govinfo-lib...) and would value your expert assessment of its accuracy and quality. Perhaps a grade score with brief comments on what stood out?
I feel current AI benchmarks don't capture the data to really gauge how reliable AI tools are for topics requiring some advanced/expert domain knowledge of. Your role is, "expert in the middle" to provide commentary on what it gets right or wrong. Everything sounds right and looks right when I don't know what is what ya know?
Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque. Users posting emotionally charged comments and speaking with an authoritative voice on topics they have little experience or knowledge in an accordingly Hacker News has become more and more useless as a news source.
From the guidelines¹:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a² semi³-noob⁴ illusion⁵, as⁶ old⁷ as⁸ the⁹ hills¹⁰.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1524184
³ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
⁴ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
⁵ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513
⁶ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
⁷ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657
⁸ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057
"Remember, kids, Clinton got a blowjob and Obama wore a beige jacket."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43661781
So you are going to post this in retaliation and not take a look at how useless this comment is?
But complaining that HN is becoming Reddit is (as demonstrated by the links) a tired, repetitive, and incorrect complaint that creates noise and does not advance the discussion. Which is why the guidelines ask you to not do it.
he literally told everyone to do it
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1143082727259...
and you might have felt especially confident if you recalled him doing the exact same thing in 2018
He literally bragged that his friend made 2.5 billion and the other 900 million that day.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1jvyryz/tru...
Anyone who held equities that day were up 6-7%, so many billionaires were up that much or more without touching their holdings.
He told everyone what he was going to do. A lot of people thought he was a lying politician who lies, and therefore these were all lies. Or, at best, jokes or exaggerations.
And now, 4 months into a 4 year term, he's doing it all. Who knew?
So when he jokes that he can do whatever he wants, including run for a third term, learn from the past: it isn't a joke, even if he's chuckling; it isn't an exaggeration; it's not a lie. It's real, it's the plan. Decide how you feel about it.
I'm not criticising anyone or anything here, I'm just stating facts. It's sad to me that so many people think this is all coming as some sort of huge surprise.
So it becomes a "seat at the table is better than no seat" thing where they won't ask Trump these questions.
Had to look it up, thanks!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_contro...
For most people, getting blowjobs from a subordinate in the office during work hours would result in more than just a warning.
Also if you think the musk, trump and his cabinet of billionaires and crypto bro advisors have no interest in trying to make the market move around, you're very very confused.
...with a massive delay, which probably wipes out any alpha you can get.
That happens after they are disclosed and this delay benefits them. Not you.
How did the Pelosis' know that the DOJ was going to file a lawsuit against Visa and as soon as it was filed, that would cause the stock to drop? [0]
The DOJ could have filed it at any time before the trade was publicly disclosed.
> Pelosi and her husband have outperformed the market by being tech-optimistic Californians.
People who trade on the advantage of insider (political, economic, etc) knowledge can easily outperform the market.
> One of their most lucrative investments was investing in Nvidia after ChatGPT was released triggering the AI boom. Did that require any particular political "insider knowledge"? No.
So you do admit that for most of the Pelosis' trades, they did use political insider knowledge then?
The level of people here defending politicians and family members of them, benefiting from insider trading loopholes is amusing to see.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-husband-sold-vis...
Wow, a classic example of Brandolini's Law! [1] Two words of bullshit required a paragraph to refute it. Perfect.
Just don't bother. They never argue in good faith. You'll just give yourself an aneurysm trying to keep up with their firehose of falsehoods.
They know and we know that even if their right wing fever dreams about Pelosi were true (which they aren't), it's obvious that the scale and criminality of what Trump did this week doesn't even begin to compare.
It doesn't matter to them. They only want to obfuscate, deflect and ideally enrage. That's what they do.
We don't even know who made these trades.
If we look at actual trades by politicians who actually sit on committees with tradable information, we know the biggest culprits are on both sides of the aisle.
https://newrepublic.com/post/177806/members-congress-made-st...
Nancy Pelosi (Democrat) made this famous in last decade, hitting news headlines with it:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-outperformed-nea...
https://nypost.com/2024/09/27/us-news/trump-calls-for-nancy-...
Inside trading rules concern only leaking corporate-private insider information.
And if you look at the trades, you’ll learn the biggest secret on Wall Street: make long term bets on tech and you’ll get richer. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
In the case of Pelosi, she became so famous about this that there are various Nancy Pelosi stock trackers now.
Pelosi’s rate of return isn’t the highest (in 2024, it was 10th, less than half the highest). If you analyze their trades, very few are suspect of timing. They just make a bunch of long term bets on tech.
https://www.fool.com/research/congressional-stock-trading-wh...
But what about the ones that very obviously are? Why did they sell a lot of Visa stocks?
"On Tuesday, less than three months after the massive transaction, Visa was hit with a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the company illegally monopolized the debit card market."
Selling whenever a company gets into regulatory trouble means you avoid all the big downs but still get from all the long term ups. Its a very simple strategy as you say, but its still insider trading even though the ups are mostly the long term gains.
Ok, I guess you got me there. I guess there is no explanation why they sold $500k-$1m Visa on July 01, 2024, almost 3 months before the Sep 24, 2024 DOJ lawsuit. It's not like Visa was in a already in in a slump since the beginning of the 2024, going in the opposite direction of their tech-based stocks [it was]. It's not like they have been slowly shedding Visa for the past decade, every couple of years [they have been]. And they must certainly have closed out their full position in Visa at tht time [they didn't]. In theory it could be possible that they were shedding that to load up on $2m-$10m of NVDA around the same time [like everybody else was]. But that would be too convenient [it's not]. And they certainly made the right choice, Visa currently being ~22% above the point that they sold at; they sure saved a lot of money doing that [they lost out on money].
Rather than taking for gospel what the leader of the opposing party and it's media arms are telling you to believe (especially when many get the value wrong), I strongly urge you to consider the factual data and draw conclusions for yourself.
And then, when you want to basically match Pelosi's trades - go load up on VOO or similar like the rest of us did in 2024.
- https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/V/ - https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/V/VOO - https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy... - https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/202... - https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/FinancialDisclosure
That's a good question and let's use that example.
According to the article and as you mentioned, they sold Visa stock less than 3 months ago and THEN the DOJ filed a lawsuit against the company.
So how did Pelosi know that that would cause the stock to drop and the DOJ was going to file it? The lawsuit wasn't public months ago and it is related to none other than the government which she has access to.
Then she traded with that information with no downside risk which she benefited from.
If that is not an insider trading loophole, I don't know what is.
>Then she traded with that information with no downside risk which she benefited from.
>If that is not an insider trading loophole, I don't know what is.
Yes, if you start with the conclusion (that she traded because of the impending DOJ lawsuit), then, yes, you will reach the conclusion that she insider traded because of the DOJ lawsuit.
If you instead ask why they might have traded Visa at the time they did, you will see that there were many valid reasons that they (and many, many others) decided it was a good time to sell. And as it turns out, they were all wrong, because Visa is up compared to the broad market since their sell date (July 1, 2024).
All said in hindsight today, but never for those who benefitted from the insider information. Investors will always buy the stock after it plummets, whilst those who didn't sell had to wait or buy lower to break even.
This does not excuse the fact that the Pelosis' benefitted from insider (political) information and traded on that, like this blatant example. An advantage that neither of us have.
Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on. If you did exactly that and made tens of millions, you would be in prison and be replying to me years later telling others not to do it.
You, nor others, have not actually proven that.
>Defending politicians trading on insider info (political or economic) isn't the hill one should die on.
Right, and that’s not what I’m doing. I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.). (Though admittedly I don’t know exactly what that looks like) They should be serving the people, not themselves.
But if I tell you sandwiches should be banned because they are bad for you and I bring you a bowl of pasta as an example of their harmful ways, I’m going to look silly, aren’t I?
In the Pelosis' circumstance, clearly their repeated actions of such trades and their connection to the timing of key legislation or lawsuits requires no further proof, given their long history of this front-running such that other congressmen and women are doing the same thing believing they can get away with the insider trading loophole.
By inspection, it is quite obvious to see how one can repeatedly front-run legislation ahead of everyone else and outperform the market.
> Right, and that’s not what I’m doing. I think politicians in top levels of government should be banned from trading their own stocks (and family, etc.).
Why not ban them from trading all stocks instead of just their own and why only those just from "top levels" of government?
They are serving the people as well and there shouldn't be exceptions for those that have access to that level of legislation before it is made public and then trade against it no?
Claiming this happens, no matter how many times you repeat it (without evidence) does not mean it happens.
Clearly, Your repeated denial of fact implies that it is instead _you_ are trading on insider information. The evidence is all right there. You should be locked up.
>it is quite obvious to see how one can repeatedly front-run legislation ahead of everyone else and outperform the market
Yes, by doing exactly what the the Pelosis and many of us did in the same time period: invest heavily in tech. I have have about double the rate of return since 2020 than the Pelosis. Many of my moves independently mimic theirs. I personally got out of Visa in Spring of 2024, also in favor of NVDA. Am I insider trading?
You already know they did and yet still continue to defend politicians like the Pelosis' trading on insider political AND legislative information before it it released publicly and that privileged access entirely benefits them, not retail investors like yourself.
So, I don't think you even believe in what you just said about supporting a ban on politicians front-running the market. It should be ALL of them and there are zero exceptions.
It's as if you really want politicians to continue front-running the market with the sort of access that they have.
> Clearly, Your repeated denial of fact implies that it is instead _you_ are trading on insider information. The evidence is all right there. You should be locked up.
You got it all mixed up and it is other way round.
I'm not the one here admitting on this site to be "trading" or copying politicians trades to get an "edge" (it really isn't) like the Pelosis' and others (who truly have insider access to decision making legislation) really have on their trades.
The stock can drop / rise before the disclosure and you would always be behind regardless. So this accusatory comment is hilarious and laughable coming from someone like you supporting politicians using such loopholes for years.
The entire point is, if YOU did that yourself, made millions BEFORE the release of key legislation and knew people with connections to congress or the government; YOU would be talking to me on this site from your prison cell telling others to not do it.
And yet, here you are without of that.
As such, it is doubly clear, as described above, that you are insider trading. I hope that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent.
You realize that what you just posted was aiding for supporting corrupt insider trading activities in congress such as [0] and [1] in both parties?
Why do you think a bi-partisan total ban on stocks for all politicians never goes forward? [2] [3] Because at least for (some) congress-people they already know that insider trading and front-running on key information can and does indeed happen.
Which is something you would be against given the Pelosis' and others directly benefitting from this loophole, like the Nvidia [1] and Google trades [3] all timed in connection to key decisions from the government.
> As such, it is doubly clear, as described above, (baseless) that you are insider trading (citation needed). I hope that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent. (no case)
Except I didn't copy or trade on anything. You admitted to what you are (baselessly) accusing me of. Also...
It's extremely more likely that you (not any congress-person) as a retail trader would be investigated and prosecuted (and jailed) for insider trading than any other congress-person, if you knew someone with political insider information and traded on that.
But please continue to defend your politicians front-running you with their insider advantage.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-stocks-t...
[1] https://nypost.com/2022/07/27/pelosis-sold-5m-in-nvidia-stoc...
[2] https://readsludge.com/2024/12/30/ro-khannas-loophole-laden-...
[3] https://fitzpatrick.house.gov/_cache/files/b/1/b1ef11f4-5242...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/odd-timing-nancy-pelosis-google-sto...
Here we have people defending politicians from benefiting from insider information and attempting to split hairs in what is the difference between Pelosi and Trump.
There isn't any.
There is no difference in them knowing something ahead of you and they may have already traded that ahead of the event. (and you copying it very late when the move has already happened).
They benefit, you do not.
The whole goal of the stock market is to come up with information that people don’t generally have (insider trading) either from research, or secret info, so you can dupe everyone else’s money.
Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).
Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed. This is also less stressful for the individual investor — most people I know who trade stocks also check the stocks 10+ times per day and it occupies such a large area of their headspace.
Is that not the SEC and Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP)?
> Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).
Is that not quarterly reports and earnings filings?
> Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed
Your suggestion was to delete it. One suggestion I've heard is to increase the transaction price, and marginally increase it with trading volume by the given actor. Micro-transactions become too expensive to be profitable.
There is also the Machiavellian consideration of external threats. We need these corporations to make the tools of Ahriman. Without them, another country's corporations will make them first, and use them to subjugate us. People who believe in God (not just the Abrahamic one, but any good creator) prefer not to play this game, but most people are strict materialists, so they are locked into this equation.