TA

“We learn from history, that we do not learn from history” - Hegel

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@Wyd_eshuu That would be sleeping in a half hour for me every day. I would take it.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@LibertyCappy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Basically wore out our VHS copy as a kid.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@mrmikeMTL 25, my wife and I were paying $750/mo in rent so we bought a condo and had an $800 mortgage instead. This was in 09. Still own it today.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@BobLoblawirl @mrmikeMTL You forgot the 1969 Camaro that you bought used for $400 and then sold at Barrett Jackson for $200,000 last year.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@Jennnyyyyyy

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@Simi_2210_

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@ronmortgageguy Sounds like an excuse to buy into brookfield funds with more tax dollars.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@briangarrett Need to grab a bag of milk and some ketchup chips.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@StealthQE4 Wow Pittsburgh Regional airport is busier than I imagined it.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@ThrillaRilla369

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@StealthQE4 How many $XOM call options did he buy after hearing that though?

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@RelentlesslyCu1 @lady_valor_07 @WebullGlobal Except for Adam Taggart on thoughtful money. @adamtaggart

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@Oceanbreeze473

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@rhum01 @BrandonWealth

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@Tablesalt13 Don’t worry the insurance companies aren’t insolvent already or anything.

[JH @CRUDEOIL231]

I think way too many ppl are delusional about this idea of letting Iran control the SoH, having the US pull out, and just letting Iran set up a toll booth.

Where does Saudi’s power actually come from? It’s not just because they’re rich. Their entire influence comes from being the world’s only swing Producer. We need oil, and Saudi controls that market.

If Iran takes over the SoH, they become the most powerful, one of a kind Global Swing Producer in history.

If they don’t like the oil price? They can just "adjust" the traffic in a strait that handles ~20mb/d to swing prices however they want.

If the UAE gets on Iran’s bad side? "No passage for UAE tankers." If Kuwait tries to build a bypass? "Fine, the SoH is closed starting today. Let’s see if you can finish that bypass—which takes years—without making a single dime."

By letting Iran control that flow, the US is effectively making Iran the ultimate energy gatekeeper. The entire regional hegemony shifts to Iran. Saudi and the UAE lose everything.

Think about it—if you were MBS, would you let this happen? Let’s say the US pulls out this week. The US started this mess, and now the GCC has to just sit there and watch their power handed over to Iran?

Let me give you a reality check for Americans: Imagine Mexico now controls the North American continent.

"Want to fly to the UK? Get Mexico’s permission. Want to import jet fuel from Asia? Pay Mexico a toll and take the route they tell you to.

Did you dare to criticize Mexico? Now, no container ships can enter your waters. You can’t say a word against the great President of Mexico."

It sounds like a fantasy, but that’s the reality for the GCC. If the US tries to run away? If I were the GCC, I wouldn’t let them leave. I’d grab them by the hair and drag them back to clean up the mess they made.

I’ve said before that this is an existential issue for Iran and Israel. Well, Iranian control of the SoH is an existential issue for every other GCC nation.

And the GCC has leverage. They have massive wealth invested in the West, huge U.S. asset holdings, decades of lobbying networks, and they are the biggest donors for Trump’s terms.

And of course they have oil. Do you really think Brent would stay below $100/bbl if the GCC teamed up and cut just 3mb/d for six months?

Even the most optimistic guy knows the answer is zero chance. They don't even need a fancy excuse: "Oh, since the US gave up on us and Iran owns the SoH, it's not safe. We have to cut production. Sorry!"

Within months, the US would be begging to come back. It’s just pushing the Middle East into an even bigger pit of fire.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk :)

#oott #iran

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@MichaelAArouet That garage is definitely full of hypercars. 🤦

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@ThHappyHawaiian And hopefully, you also bought more than a year ago and now have a cost basis of zero.

[TA @TroyArthurK]

@_ForceMajeure_1 @TwainsMustache Monday oil will be interesting.