A mysterious burst of trades ripped through global markets moments before Donald Trump hit a 5-day pause button on Iran, setting off what analysts say may have been a chain reaction that delivered an estimated Rs 840 crore profit in just 20 minutes.
At around 6:50 a.m. New York time on Monday, roughly 4:20 p.m. IST, S&P 500 E-mini futures on the CME recorded a sharp and isolated surge in volume, and oil markets moved in lockstep.
The timing was unusual: pre-market hours are typically quiet, with thin liquidity. Roughly 15 minutes later, at 7:05 a.m., Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States had held talks with Iran and would halt planned strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure. LIVE UPDATES
By then, the trades were already in place.
Two mystery bets
According to trading platform Unusual Whales, whoever executed them made two coordinated bets. First, they bought S&P 500 futures worth about Rs 12,600 crore, or 1.5 billion dollars, positioning for a market rally if tensions eased.
Second, they sold oil futures worth about Rs 1,615 crore, or 192 million dollars, anticipating a drop in crude prices if supply fears faded. In a narrow one-minute window, around 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts worth roughly 580 million dollars, or about Rs 4,870 crore, changed hands, four to six times larger than anything else trading at that hour.
Markets reacted instantly after Trump’s post: S&P 500 futures jumped more than 2.5 percent before the opening bell, while oil prices plunged. Brent crude fell from 109 dollars to as low as 92 dollars, and West Texas Intermediate dropped nearly 6 percent, briefly touching 88.70 dollars a barrel.
The payoff was enormous. By some estimates, oil price swings alone could have generated over 100 million dollars in potential profits within just twenty minutes, equivalent to roughly Rs 840 crore, with gains from the equity position likely pushing total profits significantly higher.
What makes the episode stand out is the absence of any public signal: at 4:20 p.m. IST, there was no news alert, no scheduled briefing, and no indication that Trump was about to announce a pause in strikes on Iran. Yet someone committed more than Rs 14,000 crore across two markets with precise timing.
“In 25 years of watching markets, this is a highly unusual pattern,” Matt William, a hedge fund manager, said in a X post, adding that it was hard to explain a trade of this scale on a Monday morning when there were no event factors such as major economic data releases or Federal Reserve officials’ remarks, concluding that “as a result, someone may have reaped substantial profits.”
A U.S. brokerage market strategist raised similar concerns, noting that while it is not easy to prove causation, questions will inevitably be raised about who had the incentive to aggressively trade futures 15 minutes before Trump’s post went up.
Regulators have not weighed in; the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has not commented on the trades yet.
The pattern has surfaced before. Large trades have appeared ahead of major U.S. policy moves in recent weeks. On Polymarket, for instance, a user placed a roughly 34,000-dollar bet that the United States would invade Venezuela by January just before the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, raising suspicions among some traders of insider access.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai, in a report by the Financial Times, said: “The only focus of President Trump and Trump administration officials is doing what’s best for the American people.” He added: “The White House does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge, and any implication that officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.”
Several hedge funds noted that this was one of a number of examples in recent months of large trades being made ahead of official U.S. government announcements, with one trader saying energy consultants had recently noticed several large block trades that they found to be unusually timed.
Speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, in an X post denied that any negotiations between Washington and Tehran had taken place, triggering a pullback for global stocks and fresh buying across energy markets. He added: “Fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.”