Andy Richards

Go Dawgs, Atlanta United, and Go Braves!

[New York Post @nypost]

A one-armed woman has gone mega-viral after she quickly refuted a cop’s claim that she was driving with a phone in her “right hand.”

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

Fun Fact: The war in Iran costs us more in one hour than this program costs in a year.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The FDA has blocked publication of research that found widely used Covid-19 and shingles vaccines were safe. https://t.co/P4ZNeIfvPV

[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.

[Richard Stengel @stengel]

An American president threatening the death of an ancient civilization is in some ways the end of the 250-year moral experiment of a constitutional republic that the framers saw as a model for all mankind.

[Patrick De Haan @GasBuddyGuy]

BREAKING: $4 is back. The national average has just reached $4/gal according to GasBuddy, the highest since August 8, 2022. The rise is now the largest monthly increase GasBuddy has ever recorded: $1.059/gal for gasoline, $1.701/gal for diesel.

[Night Sky Today @NightSkyToday]

There have been thousands of generations of humans, and you are alive to witness the first photo of a Sunset on another World.

This is a real photo of the sunset on Mars.😮

[Douglas A. Boneparth @dougboneparth]

Monday - War is winding down!
Tuesday - Unconditional surrender!
Wednesday - War is ending soon!
Thursday - Sending in troops!
Friday - War is almost over!
Saturday - Total obliteration!
Sunday - Golf.

[Anna Bower @AnnaBower]

Q: You don’t regret that people might’ve lost important income to support their lives?

A: No, I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit.

Q: Ok. Did you reduce the federal deficit?

A: No, we didn’t.

[PUNS @ThePunnyWorld]

Germany is now advising people to stock up on cheese and sausages.

This is called the Wurst Käse scenario

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Updated:

[Klara @klara_sjo]

The duality of man.

[Simon Harley @simonharley]

I’m impressed they got a quote from eagles.

[Lauren @cabsav456]

I just listened to the James Talarico interview. Never would’ve heard it otherwise without the FCC chaos. These were his very last words:

“They want us talking about furries and bathrooms so we don’t realize that they are picking our pockets, that they are closing our schools, they are gutting our healthcare, and they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for their billionaire donors. The culture wars are a smoke screen because the real fight in this country is not left versus right; it’s top versus bottom.”

Again, the Republicans are going to have to do a whole lot better than “Vote for us because we’re not the left.”

[Andy Richards @andycapps614]

@DawgStats Team has fallen apart. I thought they’d finally figured things out this year but maybe this is just how Mike White teams are.

[Josh RR Jokien @joshcarlosjosh]

FRODO: I wish it need not have happened in my time

GANDALF: so do all who live to see such times. but the Dow is over 50,000!

[Andy Richards @andycapps614]

They think we’re idiots and can be distracted by throwing out unrelated items to what they’re being asked about.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Bondi crashes out over Epstein: "The Dow is over 50,000 dollars! I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That's what we should be talking about."

[CONSEQUENCE @consequence]

Charley Crocket says "country music should be taking notes" from Bad Bunny.

"They keep saying I'm a cosplay cowboy but they love a cosplay president. Some folks have been on here calling Muhammad Ali a draft dodger when yall got one in the White House.

"When I was at the Grammys the other night I saw a guy get up and talk about Jesus, and then I saw Bad Bunny get up there and talk like Jesus. The country music establishment should be taking notes on a Puerto Rican American who hasn't forgotten his heritage and brought his culture's traditional music back to the front, showing the world something new with it.

"The President is a grifter who bankrupted 6 casinos. That's pretty extraordinary considering it's a rigged business in favor of the house. The only thing he's good at is filing lawsuits and portraying a successful business man as a reality TV actor.

"Last time I checked Elon Musk was an immigrant from South Africa but there he is standing in the White House buying our elections. Let's deport his ass and send Peter Thiel back with him since they both openly believe in a post democratic society where men of their class are above the law.

"Forgive me if I have a problem with a 34 time convicted felon running this country when I lost the right to vote or own a weapon for years over marijuana. As long as you're hating the oppressed and loving your oppressor you'll never know why our generation is poorer than our parents and grandparents. As a great man once said it's welfare for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.

"If you can sleep at night licking their boots that's between you and yours, but that type of thinking isn't freedom. It's mental slavery. Every single right we have as a people wasn’t handed to us. We had to fight and take it.

"Judge a man by how he treats the poor and those who he views as being able to do nothing for him. Don't forget why Muhammad Ali said 'I am America.' Remember the coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky. I believe in what we can be. Ride on."

📸: Ryan Vestil

[Tim Alberta @TimAlberta]

Yes, like so many Christians who feel besieged by a wicked culture, I'm grateful to @TPUSA for platforming the God-fearing paragon who brought us hits like "Balls in Your Mouth," "Wax the Booty" and "Cadillac Pussy"