Trump Media launched a paid data service that sells faster access to Donald Trump's Truth Social posts. Clients pay money to read his thoughts milliseconds before everyone else gets them for free.
The product assumes someone exists who needs to trade on Trump's social media posts but can't wait the extra few seconds it takes for the information to become public. That person graduated from an accredited university. That person passed a Series 7 exam. That person now pays a subscription fee to get angrier slightly faster than his competitors.
The service went live August 1st. Trump Media calls it a "data service" because "we will charge you to refresh a webpage" tested poorly with focus groups.
Algorithmic traders already scrape every social media platform in existence looking for alpha. They've been doing this for a decade. Trump Media figured out they could just charge for the scraping part and call it innovation. Brilliant. Seamless. The business model of a sophomore computer science student who just learned what an API is.
Some quantitative analyst at a midtown hedge fund pitched this to his boss. He showed a backtest. The backtest showed profitability. His boss approved the budget. They now pay Trump Media every month for data that becomes free before their order even hits the exchange.
The retail trader who buys individual stocks based on presidential social media posts will see this headline and think he's found an edge. He'll beg his broker for access. His broker will tell him it's institutional only. He'll spend six hours on Reddit finding a workaround. By the time he gets access, the edge will have been arbitraged away by Renaissance Technologies in 2024.
Trump monetized his posting. Every former president writes a memoir and does a speaking tour. This one just charges by the character.
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