Yesterday, a CNN clip was circulating on X. In it, journalist Josh Rogin laid out a pattern he said has repeated three times since the Iran war began. Each time, someone placed a massive bet on exactly what President Trump was about to post to Truth Social — in the minutes before he posted it. Each bet was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Every bet has paid off.
Megyn Kelly replied with four words — “This must be investigated” — and tagged the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The same day, Marjorie Taylor Greene joined her. The former congresswoman quote-tweeted a chart showing one of the trades and asked: “Who keeps making these trades??? There needs to be an investigation.” Her post drew more than 377,000 views.
“Somebody shorted the oil markets today by hundreds of millions of dollars exactly 20 minutes before Trump made his announcement that everything was going to be great. And if you see that once, it could be a coincidence. But that’s happened at least three times, if not more,… pic.twitter.com/9ij0gwAe94
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) April 18, 2026
What happened on March 23
On Saturday, March 21, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. That deadline landed Monday morning.
Oil markets braced. Strikes on energy infrastructure would spike crude prices — more expensive gas at the pump, jittery stock markets, a financial shock across every 401(k) in the country.
At 6:49 a.m. Monday, someone placed a massive bet that none of that would happen.
In a single minute, whoever it was sold roughly half a billion dollars’ worth of oil contracts — a bet that oil would soon get cheaper, not more expensive. Simultaneously, they bought stock futures — a bet that the market would rally. That minute saw nine times the normal trading activity for that time of day. There was no public news to explain any of it.
If Trump had gone through with the strikes at his own deadline, the bet would have blown up. Oil would have spiked. Stocks would have dropped. Whoever placed the trade could have lost hundreds of millions within minutes.
Just after 7 a.m., Trump posted that he was calling off the strikes.
Oil prices crashed more than 10%. Stock futures jumped more than 2.5%. The Dow closed up more than 1,000 points. Whoever placed the bets won on both sides.
It happened twice more
This must be investigated @SECGov https://t.co/1bTzFRuUbt
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) April 18, 2026
On April 7, roughly $950 million in the same kind of bet appeared hours before Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran. Oil fell about 15%.
On April 17 — the day Rogin appeared on CNN — it happened a third time. At 8:24 a.m., someone bought nearly $800 million worth of oil shorts. Twenty-one minutes later, Iran’s foreign minister announced that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open.” By 9:10 a.m., oil had crashed below $84 a barrel, its lowest price in more than a month.
Three bets. Three announcements. More than $2 billion risked. Every bet paid off.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, summed it up on CNBC: “The only plausible answer to that question is an insider trader. Any other alternative is a statistical impossibility.”
Who in Washington is doing something about it
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has opened a probe, Bloomberg reported April 15, requesting trading records from CME Group and ICE Futures.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to the CFTC on April 9 asking for a formal investigation into possible “recurring misappropriation of material nonpublic government information.” Torres sent his own letter warning the episode “may constitute one of the largest instances of insider trading in history.” Representative Sam Liccardo sent another to the SEC on April 17. Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman called the March 23 trade “treason.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle told CNBC that “any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.” He did not say whether anyone had been.
What hasn’t happened
No trader has been publicly identified. No charges have been filed. No tie to anyone inside the administration has been established.
Last year, according to NOTUS, the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section — the unit that historically prosecutes corruption by federal officials — was cut from 36 lawyers to two. Last month, Reuters reported that the SEC’s top enforcement official resigned after clashing with agency leadership over pursuing cases that touched the president’s circle.
The bets were placed. The announcements followed. Whoever got rich is still anonymous.