Julie Gleason

Dance as if no one is watching...

[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.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.

[reb @rebmasel]

Carroll, now a bright spot on our Moon, because four people, who traveled farther from Earth than any human in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth has ever been, loved someone so much, they carried her the whole way there.

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

There are no words.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

"the right people voting to elect the right leaders"

Sorta like how the right people were elected to go to the Party Congresses and elect the right Central Committee in Moscow

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

kind of funny that an olympian said they are here to represent "compassion, respect, love for others" and some people automatically know that's a statement against them

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Don't say, "The most corrupt administration in American history." There is no comparison between Trump, on the one hand, and eg Grant, Harding, or Nixon on the other. Nixon's worst day in office was 100x better than Trump's best day. The relevant comparisons are to non-American presidents in authoritarian societies with unfree media. Trump's scale of stealing and bribe-taking has never been remotely paralleled in any democratic country ever before.

[Thomas Novelly @TomNovelly]

OVERNIGHT: President Trump’s $1,776 checks for 1.45 million troops announced Wednesday night come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior official confirmed to @DefenseOne.

https://t.co/mGWski9Exl

[Polly Sigh @dcpoll]

Because Trump granted him asylum earlier this year.

[Be A King @BerniceKing]

👋🏾 For anyone saying this doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. Regardless of party affiliation, this should ring the alarm (again).

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

The amount is meaningless — less than one day of salary. But the principle is important: once the armed services are paid by the oligarchs, they become a private militia, and we no longer have a country.
https://t.co/6NQtjhhFsk

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Any American medium that fails to cover the largest protests in American history is failing in the basic mission of informing the public about the facts.
#NoKings

[Acyn @Acyn]

Jessica: I wanted to go over a few of the things people who are going to be out there on the streets peacefully protesting are upset about. Starting with the basics: 

Signing an executive order to do away with birthright citizenship which is literally in the
constitution. 

Sending troops into blue cities. 

Unilaterally implementing tariffs which congress gets to do. 

I already talked about the 170 Americans who've been locked up. 

Cracking down on the first amendment, detaining students for op-eds you don't like, targeting law firms, universities. 

Reallocating funds appropriated by congress

Making billions off of crypto scam

The Trump administration has defied one in three judges that have ruled against him. You're seeing that from judges appointed by Reagan up to Donald Trump that are saying absolutely not. You are breaking the law. 

All of that is what "No kings" day is all about

[Claude Taylor @TrueFactsStated]

Words cannot express how much I love this. Humor is critical in stopping the Fascists.

[Stephanie Ruhle @SRuhle]

EMERGENCY MEDICAID REIMBURSES HOSPITALS FOR CARE TO UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS BECAUSE BY LAW HOSPITALS CANNOT TURN AWAY ANYONE IN AN EMERGENCY.
RONALD REGAN SIGNED THIS INTO LAW.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

Blaming Democrats for a shutdown when you control the House, Senate, and the White House only proves you can't govern.

[Andrew Weinstein @Weinsteinlaw]

It really is staggering to see so many people willing to abandon our 249 year experiment in democracy for an increasingly unstable criminally convicted reality show charlatan.

[Lou Diamond Phillips @LouDPhillips]

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped…”
Orwell 1984

[Doc  @DocAtCDI]

ICE officers stopped by our farm yesterday.

“We need to inspect your property for illegal aliens,” one of them said.

I replied, “Alright, but whatever you do, don’t go into that field over there.”

The officer in charge exploded.

“Mister, I have the authority of the federal government behind me!” he barked, reaching into his back pocket. He yanked out a badge and shoved it in my face.

“See this fucking badge? This badge means I can go wherever I want on ANY land. No questions asked, no answers given. Am I clear? Do you understand?”

I nodded politely and said, “Be my guest.”

Then I went back to my chores.

About ten minutes later, I heard screaming. I looked up and saw six ICE agents running for their lives, being chased by my big, mean, old bull. And with every step, that bull was closing in. Fast.

It looked like they were about to get gored for sure.

So I dropped my tools, ran over to the fence, and shouted at the top of my lungs:

“YOUR BADGE! SHOW HIM YOUR FUCKING BADGE!”