This is how the Wall Street bots reap profits from Trump’s posts

According to traders, many of the major investment companies have developed automatic systems that monitor the publications on the Truth network, identify important keywords and perform actions, sometimes within a fraction of a second, such as opening or closing positions in various stocks.

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A review of trading data carried out by the Wall Street Journal shows how quickly some traders respond to the president’s online postings. According to the data of the research company DTN, in the minute after the publication of two posts by Trump on the subject of Iran last month, more than 2 million shares were traded. These transactions led to fluctuations of more than 2% in almost 24 stocks from the fields of energy and industry.

Trump Media and Technology Group’s new product, Truth API, will allow companies to pay for even faster access to the president’s posts. According to sources familiar with the matter, the company plans to charge between 60 and 100 thousand dollars per month for those who commit for several years. These are sums that most private investors, who probably religiously follow Trump’s posts on social networks, cannot afford.

Trump Media said in response to questions that “Truth API is designed to transfer posts as soon as they become public for everyone, and not before.”

On June 9, at 12:38 p.m., the president published a post in which he wrote that Iran shot down an Apache helicopter patrolling the skies over the Strait of Hormuz, and noted: “The United States must, by necessity, respond to this attack.” The trading data examined by the Wall Street Journal shows that trading in energy stocks jumped almost immediately after the publication of the post, and led to increases in the entire market.

Two days later, the president announced that he was canceling the strikes planned for that evening, because the negotiations with Iran were progressing. He even hinted that a long-term peace agreement was within reach: “The date and place for the signing will be announced soon,” he wrote. This time, the immediate reaction in the markets was sharp declines in energy stocks and stocks related to the defense industries.

Nanoseconds ahead of the competition – a significant advantage

Sources familiar with the matter said that Trump Media executives, Vladimir Nowetsky, the chief technology officer, Paul Bremer, the chief revenue officer, and Matthews Wagner, the director of strategic initiatives, are in talks with trading companies to market the paid “feed” delivery service. The service will include access to the posts of the most senior accounts on the platform. President Trump has the largest number of followers, about 13 million users, and his sons and Vice President JD Vance also enjoy a large number of followers.

According to one of the sources, among the companies that have already registered for the service are five that specialize in high-frequency trading. These companies try to make profits from small and short-term price differences between assets, so the speed of response is a critical factor for them. In this field, receiving information even a few nanoseconds (a nanosecond is the time it takes for light to travel a distance of about 30 centimeters) before the competition may provide a significant advantage.

Companies that specialize in high-frequency trading try to gain an advantage in many ways, including placing their servers as close as possible to the computers that operate stock exchanges such as Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). According to Eric Budish, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, who has studied the field, some companies are even placing servers in the Washington area to be as close as possible to the government’s economic data publishing hubs.

Acquiring access to a fast feed (FEED) is another tool in their arsenal. For example, if a trading company placed buy orders for oil futures, and then received through the new service a post from Trump in which he announced that the war with Iran was over, it could immediately cancel the buy orders and switch to a short position on oil – as Joe Saluzzi, one of the founders of the brokerage firm Themis Trading, explains. All this may happen before other investors even see the post.

“They must be the fastest, so they build all kinds of systems around it,” Saluzzi said. “This is probably the part that was missing in the lineup.”

Will the service become a mandatory tool for those active in the industry?

Markets on Wall Street are now reacting more moderately to the president’s social media posts than early in his term, for example when his then-announcement of the elimination of tariffs led to a 12% jump in the Nasdaq index in one trading day. However, fast traders can still take advantage of the fluctuations it creates in individual stocks and the market as a whole.

Trading companies are already automatically scanning his feed in search of mentions of companies or phrases like “Thank you for your attention to this matter”, which may indicate that this is a message of special importance. Additional keywords may be ceasefire or Iran. Some companies even use artificial intelligence agents to quickly assess the possible impact of his words on the markets.

Sometimes, even without mentioning a particular company, Trump’s statements may have a short-term effect on specific stocks. For example, on January 7 of this year he announced that he was working to prohibit large institutional investors from purchasing additional detached houses, and wrote that “people live in houses, not corporations”. Following the publication, the shares of companies such as Blackstone and Invitation Homes, which operate in this field, registered sharp declines.

According to some traders, Truth Social’s fast feed service is expected to become a must-have tool in the industry, and many companies will sign up to it so as not to be left behind. “It’s an expense designed to protect you from falling behind the competition, not necessarily to gain an advantage in trading,” said David Ball, a director at Baycrest options brokerage.

Many private investors also want to act following Trump’s posts on social networks, and are active in Reddit forums dedicated to the subject. But those investors cannot react at a speed approaching that of a trading algorithm. “Private investors just don’t have a chance to react fast enough for it to be meaningful,” Ball said.

Truth Social’s real-time information feed service has been criticized by members of the Democratic Party, not surprisingly, including Senator Mark Warner who claimed that it was a conflict of interest on the part of the president, and that the service “will create a two-tier system of access to government information, and will harm the credibility of the US capital markets.”

The Trump Media spokesperson stated in this context that certain politicians falsely accuse the company of “conduct that is contrary to the principles of the free market, and at the same time exert pressure on companies to boycott its product, as part of a coordinated effort to harm a public company.”