Politics

White House Warns Staff After Suspicious Iran Trades

By Mike Harper · April 10, 2026

The warning came one day too late — at least for the people who had already cashed in.

According to Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, the White House sent a staff-wide internal email in late March warning employees against using confidential information to place trades on financial markets and online prediction platforms. The message went out on March 24 — one day after Trump posted to Truth Social that he was pausing threatened strikes on Iranian power plants.

What happened in the 15 minutes before that post is the reason the email existed at all.

At 6:49 a.m. on March 23, oil futures contracts worth billions of dollars changed hands in under two minutes — roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate contracts, representing at least 6 million barrels. The average trading volume for that same two-minute window over the prior five days was about 700 lots. Trump’s Truth Social post went up at 7:05 a.m. Oil prices dropped sharply. Equities surged.

The pattern was hard to dismiss as coincidence.

On prediction markets, the situation drew additional scrutiny. Three accounts on Polymarket earned more than $600,000 by correctly betting on the timing of the Iran ceasefire announcement. Eight newly created accounts, opened around March 21, collectively positioned for a ceasefire before March 31. The same type of suspiciously timed gains had appeared earlier when the U.S. captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — anonymous accounts, precise timing, massive returns.

Congressman Ritchie Torres sent a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission calling for an investigation into suspicious trades. Democratic leaders introduced legislation that would ban prediction market betting on war or military action entirely.

The White House has denied any wrongdoing. Spokesman Davis Ingle called reports of insider activity “baseless and irresponsible reporting” and said federal employees are already subject to ethics guidelines prohibiting the use of insider information for personal financial gain.

That part isn’t settled. The CFTC has not announced a formal investigation. Polymarket and Kalshi — the two dominant platforms — have both grown explosively, with combined monthly trading volume reportedly reaching $18.3 billion in February, up from under $2 billion as recently as August 2025. The scale of the industry now means that well-timed geopolitical bets generate the kind of returns that attract serious scrutiny.

Whether the trades involved actual White House insiders or sophisticated outside actors reading public signals is genuinely unknown. But the pattern — large, precisely timed positions just before major presidential announcements — has appeared multiple times. And that’s the part that isn’t going away.