A lawsuit claims Trump's posts on Truth Social move financial markets. Filed in Manhattan. The whole thing hinges on advance access to those posts being sold before everyone else saw them.
Let me walk you through the chain of failure here. Someone paid money for early access to Trump's thoughts. Then someone else found out about it. Then that person hired a lawyer. Then the lawyer filed paperwork. Then presumably someone will spend years arguing about whether knowing Trump's opinion three minutes early constitutes material nonpublic information.
The retail traders who based their portfolios on parsing presidential typos are now discovering they weren't even getting the typos first. They were trading on delayed typos. Second-hand stream of consciousness. Sloppy seconds on the national id.
Truth Social posts moving markets is not the scandal. The scandal is that we built a financial system so f*cked and so fragile that it responds to social media posts like a speedball addict responds to a car backfiring. A man types words into his phone and pension funds in Ohio start hemorrhaging value. This is not a bug in capitalism. This is the system working exactly as designed.
The lawsuit notes this happens often. Trump posts, markets move. As if this is surprising. As if we didn't spend four years watching forex traders refresh Twitter every eleven seconds waiting to find out if we were invading Denmark or just misspelling it.
Now someone wants damages because they didn't get the trade-moving posts fast enough. They were trading on public information like peasants while someone else was trading on information that would become public in forty-five seconds. The edge was measured in heartbeats. The profit margin thinner than the president's understanding of monetary policy.
Somewhere a retail trader is reading this headline and thinking he should've been the one selling advance access.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
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