Why Trump Wages War When the Markets Are Closed, and How Some Traders Are Profiting Handsomely

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0:32This is Carlo Versano here with you. This country was stone cold dead. Happy Friday, if you're listening here on Friday. Friday, of course, the end of the work week for us office drones and the beginning of the war week for the Trump administration, which has taken to making its most drastic, most escalatory moves in this conflict with Iran, specifically after the closing bell rings on Wall Street and before the markets reopen on Monday. So this is a pattern that we have seen many times now and not just with respect to Iran. Trump will make these market moving announcements during these sort of strategic windows.

1:05It's not just on the weekends, but those late Friday and early Monday windows tend to be when the biggest news events happen. So let's travel back in time, shall we? Let's go back to last fall, October 10th. This was a Friday, 4.20 p.m. Eastern time. This is just after the markets closed for that week. Trump announces a 130 percent tariff on China. This comes out of nowhere, if you'll recall, which is an escalation of the trade war that he started back in April. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Which, of course, led to the original tariff taco. Trump always chickens out after markets plunged in response to those Liberation Day tariffs.

1:45By the way, just before Trump announced that 90-day pause on the original tariffs on April 10th, he posted on Truth Social that it was, quote, a great day, a great time to buy stocks. Of course, he was right. If you had listened to him, you could have ridden the S &P up 10 percent that day. That was one of the largest one-day gains in its history. So as for those China tariffs, they were also scaled back. China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump's very, very large brain. Now, let's fast forward to January 21st of this year. This was actually a Wednesday, just after 9 a.m. on the East Coast, 20 minutes before the markets open in New York.

2:24Trump is in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and he announces a, quote, framework for a future deal on Greenland. So this is in the midst of all of his threats that we're going to annex Greenland from Denmark, take it by force in some way. That framework didn't actually exist, by all accounts. We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not. But the walk back on Greenland came just after stocks had their worst showing since October, the previous day, on January 20th, amid concerns by investors from investors that we might actually go to war with our European allies over Greenland.

2:58We don't do it the easy way. We're going to do it the hard way. So Trump sees the price action. He tacos again. Operation Midnight Hammer last summer. The operation in January, the black bag Maduro and took him from his bed in Venezuela to a jail in Brooklyn. The decapitation strikes on Iran that opened Operation Epic Fury four weeks ago. What do they all have in common? Well, they all took place on a weekend. So just to be clear, I'm not arguing there's anything nefarious about that, right? Companies make big announcements when the markets are closed and, you know, before the weekend. They do this all the time.

3:31Corporate earnings come out usually before the bell or after the bell. They rarely come out during the trading day. And the point there is you want to give investors time to, you know, sort of digest news, you know, before they react to the headline news. So governments do this too. They bury bad news on Friday afternoons, Friday nights. If you've ever worked in the news business, you know that some of the busiest hours of the day are that period after 5 p.m. on Friday when governments do the quote unquote news dump and they put out news that they would rather people not pay attention to. It's classic of the genre.

4:02Again, nothing particularly special about any of this. Trump, of course, he takes this to a new level, as he is wont to do. It's one thing to wait until Friday night to announce a round of layoffs or an investment that went bad or some official resigning under weird circumstances. says, it's another thing to start a war. It's another thing to strike nuclear facilities or announce the opening or closing of a commercial shipping choke point when Wall Street, when the street can't react to those announcements. And that is effectively what the president is doing. And then, of course, there's the specter of actual market manipulation.

4:36Now, this is something that haunts this administration. One alleged example occurred this past Monday on March 23rd. So let's take a look at this. 6.50 a.m. Eastern Time, nearly$600 million in oil future contracts flood the market, right? This is at the same time that roughly$1.5 billion in S &P futures are also trading hands. 14 minutes later, 7.04 a.m. on Monday, President Trump announces, quote, productive discussions were underway and that he was postponing strikes on the Iranian energy infrastructure, which he had threatened on Saturday, again, when the markets were closed, so they couldn't digest it.

5:10So he was postponing those strikes on energy infrastructure for five days. Five days, also important, that punts this deadline to this weekend. So we shall see, by the time you watch this, we may know if, you know, that deadline was punted again or if those strikes began. My whole life has been a negotiation, but with Iran, we've been negotiating for a long time. And this time, they've been business. By 7, 10 a.m. on Monday morning, the S &P had risen 250 points. So that adds about$2 trillion in market cap. This is per the Kobayesi letter, which is a stock analyst sort of tip sheet that circulates on social media.

5:48They've been following this very closely. So that$1.5 billion position made$60 million profit in six minutes. Not bad. 30 minutes later, Iran says there actually are no talks. They say whatever Trump said was completely wrong. There's been no direct contact with the United States. And they accused Trump of just trying to buy time by calming the markets, right? 8 a.m. on Monday, the S &P has dropped 120 points now, erasing almost a trillion dollars of those gains. So that is a$3 trillion swing in an hour, an hour before the trading day has even begun. All of it based on the whims of an American president communicating via his personal social media platform, basically saying whatever he wants to say, knowing that what those announcements are moved the markets in these dramatic ways, right?

6:33So if you knew Trump was going to back down from that threat, the threat that he had leveled over the weekend about the energy infrastructure, you could have made a fortune front running it. And I'm not accusing anybody of doing that. There's no evidence that somebody did that, but there is a lot of evidence that something happened in those future markets in that brief period before Trump made that announcement. So this pattern extends to the trading day as well. It's not just on the weekends. Let's go back to last Friday. So this is March 20th, 2.30 p.m. Eastern time. We're approaching the final hour of trading for the week.

7:03CBS News reports Trump is considering a boots on the ground operation in Iran. 3.43 p.m., 17 minutes before the markets close for the week. Trump says he has no interest in a ceasefire. S &P tanks closes at its low for the year. It's low for 2026. I don't want to do a ceasefire. You know, you don't do a ceasefire when you're literally obliterating the other side. So 90 minutes later now, just after 5 p.m., markets are closed for the weekend, but you can still do trading in the after hours, as it's known. Trump says the U.S. is, quote, considering winding down the war. So that is a big leap from where he was just an hour earlier, saying that he had no interest in a ceasefire and that we might put boots on the ground.

7:41So he's flip-flopping on that within the span of about an hour. Now, an hour after that, 6.15 p.m. Eastern, the market's up nearly 2 % from its low, adding$900 billion in market cap to the S &P, again, according to Kobe Esi. So in that 90-minute window, the S &P rises 1 % on no real news, right? And that's very rare, and that is important. If you talk to traders, traders have been pointing this out on social media, the market, the S &P doesn't move by a percentage point on nothing. It moves on information, right? So 6.15 p.m., the S &P had rallied 2 % off of its lows in after-hours trading. All of this suggests that somebody somewhere either guessed or had knowledge that Trump was going to sort of turn dovish, take this dovish turn with respect to ending the conflict, which, by the way, has not ended.

8:29So we don't even really know where he was then. But again, huge moves based on the whims of the president. So this is the pattern, right? Trump makes news. He usually does it through posts on True Social. That news moves markets by often billions of dollars. And significant price movements occur in these narrow windows right in front of and right in the back of these announcements. And again, these announcements are often diametrically opposed and contradictory. He says one thing, markets move one direction. He says another thing, markets move in the opposite direction. And it's not just equity and commodity markets.

9:02Some of the biggest swings that we've seen around these Trump announcements happen on these prediction markets, places like Kalshi and Polymarket, which we've talked about. And they, of course, benefit from being virtually unregulated. In the case of Polymarket, it's entirely anonymous. It's done through crypto. So you can't even really tell who's buying what. Let's look at the Friday before the war began in late February. About 150 Polymarket accounts placed hundreds of bets that U.S. strikes on Iran are imminent, that they were going to occur by the next day. And wouldn't you know it? Wouldn't you know it?

9:31Those people were right. Again, before the Maduro raid back in In January, one poly market trader turned about$32 ,000 into$400 ,000, more than$400 ,000, betting on the capture of the Venezuelan dictator hours before it happened. Again, information that no one could have plausibly known was coming unless you were either on that mission or had knowledge of it. Talk about luck, right? Now, you would think this would be something that the SEC might want to investigate, perhaps might want to probe. They're supposed to be all about market integrity after all. Their top enforcement official, by the way, resigned last week.

10:05allegedly, or at least reportedly via Reuters, they had a disagreement with the White House. Nothing to see there, I guess. How about the DOJ? The DOJ has a specific division called the Public Integrity Division that was created after Watergate, specifically to go after government corruption, right, to probe public corruption. They might want to investigate any of this, but turns out the Public Integrity Division was neutered by this administration, reduced from 36 lawyers to down to just two. So I wouldn't really count on them to look into any of this either. So for the record, the administration has called any suggestion that anybody close to Trump has been profiting off of material non-public information, otherwise known as insider trading.

10:44They've called that, quote, baseless and irresponsible. And again, there is no evidence that I've seen, at least, that Trump or anybody around him personally knew or were involved with any of these suspicious trades, either on the prediction markets or in the equities and commodity markets. But there wouldn't be, would there, right? Financial regulators are out to lunch. They're not looking into this. and trades are anonymous. So there's no real way to know. So I guess we'll just have to take the White House's word for it. So by the time you hear this or listen to this, the weekend may have already happened.

11:14We may have put boots on the ground. Trump may have walked back. He may have ended the war. Who the hell knows, right? It's impossible to tell. But what is possible to know is that there are people in this country and overseas who are making lots of money front running these announcements, trying to get in front of whatever Trump says, whatever he does. and I guess more power to them. I don't know. All right, tell me what you guys think. My email's in the newsletter. You can comment below. Reach me on subtext. We'll be back here with another episode very soon.

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