Windo Hutabarat

[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.

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

China’s state media turned the US-Iran conflict into an AI generated cartoon and captured the gist of the conflict pretty perfectly! Cinematically really well done! A+ trolling!

Thanks to @AngelicaOung for adding subtitles!

[Elisa Mosini 🇪🇺🇮🇹 @MosiniElisa]

Ahahahaha Guys, you’ve got to admit one thing: British humour is unbeatable.

https://t.co/lGJtr0Ibg9

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Wow USA, this one must hurt!!!

“We do not want to be rich like Americans. Look how greedy they are, even trying to invade their friends. We would not sell ourselves. We know what happened to Indigenous people in Alaska and Native Americans. Their land was taken, and they were not treated well.”

— Greenlandic politician Tillie Martinussen

That is not a throwaway jab, it is a full moral indictment. It flips the usual American self image on its head: wealth is not automatically admired, and power is not automatically respected. When someone says they would rather stay themselves than become “rich like Americans,” they are basically saying the brand is broken, and the history is part of the reason.

Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Malcolm Nance @MalcolmNance]

CONSEQUENCES FOR DUMBASSES: You are an F'ing idiot. If we invade Greenland we go to war with 31 nations. NATO stays together but without us. Its HQ is in Brussels, not the Pentagon. Our global reach across the Atlantic will end with our closest refueling base in Israel or Egypt. 100,000 American soldiers will be forced to board civil airliners and sent home or be taken as POWs/Detainee sWITHOUT WEAPONS OR EQUIPMENT. Canada will close its airspace and sea space. US Ballistic Missile Defense at Pettufik and Fylingdales ENDS, which means we see nothing except what space sensors can see. US Intelligence is reduced to Fort Meade, Ft Gordon and Colorado Springs and Hawaii. CIA spies will be rolled up by their former friends in HOURS. NO ONE WILL SHARE ANYTHING WITH US. ALL GLOBAL SHIPPING WILL BE CLOSED TO US. Denmark operates the largest shipping company in the world. SIX OUT OF TEN global shipping companies are in Europe ... Worlds Biggest container ships? DENMARK!
Australia, NZ, Canada are Commonwealth so they will cut ties with us or be neutral too.

PS Denmark & locals tun all life support and generators at Pittufik and Canada resupplies it ... all 150 US Spece force personnel would become POWs to guys on sleds. FYI They have troops there now and 35,000 Caribou hunting rifles.
FYI France and UK have nukes. Hundreds of them so you cannot intimidate them with that.
Oh and they collapse the US economy by sanctioning us and selling off 2.3 Trillion in US treasuries simultaneously. Also no Botox, Ozempic or insulin. Its made in Denmark.
Ya fucking dope.

[Aida Greenbury @AidaGreenbury]

Look, Papua’s keystone species has lost its home. 

The cassowary is considered a keystone species in the Papua rainforest, vital for maintaining the forest's biodiversity and ensuring the regeneration of many plant species. Without them, the forest ecosystem would change dramatically.

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

The despair of a Sumatran #orangutan trying to protect his home.

Time to protect the planet and everything on it. #ActOnClimate

#ClimateEmergency #climateaction #deforestation #nature

[Soe Tjen Marching @SoeTjenMarching]

Mohon viralkan: Tolak dan lawan delik penghinaan terhadap Presiden/Wapres, yang akan jadi alat mengebiri kebebasan berpendapat.

Dalam demokrasi, rakyatlah yang berkuasa. Tapi justru rakyat yang selama ini sering sekali dibungkam, ditindas dan dianggap remeh.

[Tangwa Abilu.🌿🌏🌾🍀🍃.SDG's. @AbiluTangwa]

🚨 Alert: Indonesia is pushing forward with one of the world's largest deforestation projects in Papua, clearing up to 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of pristine forest for sugarcane plantations. This biodiverse hotspot is being sacrificed for bioethanol and crops.

[Carolyn Hinds 🇧🇧 #FreePalestine #CongoInCrisis @CarrieCnh12]

I just don't know what to say about what the Indonesian president is doing. It's just so maliciously evil.

[Weather Monitor @WeatherMonitors]

This is what people are facing in Indonesia. Another area affected by the massive flood is Lubuk Belimbing, Rejang Lebong, Bengkulu🇮🇩. Residents were urged to stay alert as floodwaters rose. Stay safe. Video from Popi Junia (30/12).

[Gump n Hell #gumpnhell @gumpnhell]

Happy New Fear!

- Orback -

#hatihatikamumulaiberpikir

[Soe Tjen Marching @SoeTjenMarching]

Mohon viralkan: Alfarisi Bin Rikosen, tahanan politik yg meninggal dalam penjara. Ini bukan kecelakaan tapi kesengajaan rezim Prabowo–Gibran.
(Sumber: @KontraS)
#ResetIndonesia #rakyatjagarakyat #rawatsuarawarga

[JATOSINT @Jatosint]

This is the second known case of an Indonesian Military #TNI member snatching a journalist’s phone and demanding footage be deleted while covering disaster response in Aceh

In this occasion, the soldier openly says he doesn’t care about the journalist’s status—clearly undermining press freedom

[GO GREEN @ECOWARRIORSS]

A 70 million year old forest blitzed and a further 5 million acres to be logged
One of biggest eco crimes in human history happening now
But notice how #BBC #ITV #SKY #CBS #ABC #FOX #ZDF #ARD #CNN refuse to report it

[Soe Tjen Marching @SoeTjenMarching]

Viralkan tag #BebaskanLaras