Michelle B

Retired social worker. Equine therapy volunteer.Forever #TeamPete. she/her

[Michelle B @michf11]

@FreddyLA7 Canada is glorious. Hope you got to see Niagara Falls on the way

[Michelle B @michf11]

@FreddyLA7 @houstonpolice Omg are they showing you their guns? Really is the most American experience

[Michelle B @michf11]

@FreddyLA7 A smart hotel in Houston would host you guys for free!

[Michelle B @michf11]

@FreddyLA7 Having just returned from Belgium, our American breakfast look terrible and sad haha

[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.

[Michelle B @michf11]

@UPS Have tried logging into my account on 3 different browsers and your website won’t let me. Help

[Michelle B @michf11]

@Delta @delta Dtr is on a flight in jfk that was just cancelled. Can you rebook her asap onto the next flight

[Michelle B @michf11]

@NXSTMediaGroup @TEGNA What in the ever loving fk are you doing taking @JimmyKimmelLive off the air. So you are against free speech and pro authoritarianism? Pathetic

[Michelle B @michf11]

@ABC Now do a story about how pathetic your network is for cowing to pressure from the right and taking off @JimmyKimmelLive

[Michelle B @michf11]

@AirbnbHelp please tell me your co founder isn’t really joining DOGE. If so I am done with you 😢

[Michelle B @michf11]

@Airbnb @211LACounty What is this I’m reading about your co founder joining DOGE? Please tell me it isn’t true

[Michelle B @michf11]

@realDonaldTrump Nothing threatens the United States as much as you. And my pronouns are She/her

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.
President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.

[Michelle B @michf11]

@peterrhague But will you go bankrupt seeking medical care and having necessary care or medicine denied? Or paying for insulin that should cost cents but is marked up so people ration and then die?

[Wendy Hasson MD @WendyHassonMD]

Have you ever watched a baby die of pertussis? I have. Several.

This is what it looks like:
A newborn baby can’t stop coughing. They can’t catch their breath and they can’t eat. They get dehydrated and stop peeing. They sometimes have pauses in their breathing. Parents are terrified so they come to the ER.

In the ER, labs show they have a dangerously high white blood cell count. Their blood has become thick from the white blood cells and doesn’t travel through organs like it should. Less oxygen gets delivered to vital organs. They start to seize. Imaging reveals they had a stroke. They can’t pump blood to their lungs and body.

A breathing tube gets placed in their trachea. They get put on a ventilator. A plastic catheter is placed in their veins and arteries to give them medicine and measure blood pressure.

If they are lucky, they can make it to a #PedsICU that provides #ECMO, or full heart lung bypass. They are attached to machines that take over all their body functions.

But it’s too late. Their hands and feet turn black because they can’t perfuse their bodies. Their faces turn grey/green. They won’t stop seizing from the brain injury.

They are attached to too many machines to hold while alive and parents lay their bodies on top of them and cry until they fall asleep then cry again.

There is nothing to do but stop the machines. Antibiotics to treat pertussis were given but were no match for the infections effects on a newborn baby.

Parents finally hold their baby after the machines have turned off and their baby is cold and lifeless.

Is this what you want? This is what RFK Jr will bring to American families.

[Michelle B @michf11]

@MattGertz Please go to Bluesky

[Michelle B @michf11]

@MarkHamill is that your real account on Bluesky? Sources say no

[Michelle B @michf11]

@MattGertz Congratulations! Are you on Bluesky yet?

[Michelle B @michf11]

@joncoopertweets He probably just pooped his diaper

[Michelle B @michf11]

@MarkMantis @acnewsitics I just followed you on Bluesky for this comment 🤣