Warren and Schiff want the SEC to look into Trump Media's paid service that gives subscribers faster access to Trump's Truth Social posts. The posts move markets. The paid service gives some people the posts before other people get the posts. This is somehow different from every other information asymmetry in finance, apparently.
Trump posts something about tariffs or China or whatever crosses his mind at that moment. Global markets hurl themselves off a cliff or rocket to the moon. Happens all the time. But now you can pay to see the cliff or the moon a few seconds earlier than the poors scrolling for free. Revolutionary business model. Nobody has ever sold access to information before this moment in human history.
The concern is insider trading. Fair enough. Though calling it insider trading when the inside information is a 280-character brain fart about trade policy feels generous to the concept of insider trading. Renaissance Technologies spent decades hiring PhDs to front-run order flow by microseconds and nobody wrote a letter. But a septuagenarian with a phone and a monetization strategy? Time to protect the integrity of the markets.
Retail traders are furious they have to compete with premium subscribers. They were already getting cooked by high-frequency algorithms, dark pools, payment for order flow, and their own catastrophic risk management. Now they have to worry about someone reading a Truth Social post eight seconds before they do. That was the missing piece. That was what stood between them and profitability.
The paid tier costs less than a Netflix subscription, which means the average day trader just discovered they've been losing money to people who couldn't even afford thirteen bucks a month.
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