For up to $100,000 a month, investment banks, hedge funds and algorithmic trading firms can now buy access to President Trump’s Truth Social posts milliseconds before they are made public. The premise is that Trump’s posts move markets so much that getting access to these posts mere milliseconds earlier is enough to gain an edge in the market – the elusive alpha that hedge funds are so obsessed with.
Critics are labeling it a blatant violation of insider information laws. Without going into the legality of the offering, I want to challenge Trump’s claim about the actual value of early access to his posts.
We found no evidence of any systematic trading strategy that could deliver a profit
Given Trump’s continuous impact on markets, I decided to run an experiment. I asked our quant team at Oraclum Capital, an options-trading hedge fund I co-founded, to run the President’s Truth Social posts against market reactions to see if there are any meaningful signals that could be derived from them. We ran the analysis last year, so we only focused on Truths from 2025. We selected posts based on keywords relating to policy and market-related triggers – such as tariffs and his post-tariff negotiations with China and many other countries – rather than rants, trolling or pictures of himself as Jesus.
We observed the impact these posts had on the S&P 500 and on market volatility (the VIX), and expressed the signal via paper trading SPX options and/or ES futures. In the end, we found no evidence of any systematic trading strategy that could continuously deliver a profit.
In other words, the Truths are complete noise. He simply posts too much, even on policy, and 90 percent of the time the market doesn’t react at all. Sometimes the reaction is even the opposite of what you might expect, especially when the same message is repeated continuously. Any alpha that is made from early access to a few high-hitting posts is competed away – you lose so much on all the other ones that are supposed to be winners but are not, that the early access simply isn’t worth it. This is without accounting for any transaction costs or slippage, not to mention the scalability of the strategy for bigger trade sizes.
The main issue here is selection bias. You see an outcome ex post and make a conclusion that it was a market-moving signal. Recognizing which post will move markets ex ante is much more difficult. It means you need to be certain, or at least have a defined probability distribution over which posts will move markets in your expected direction. And with something as chaotic and unpredictable as Trump’s posts, this is nearly impossible.
The second issue is that any edge one initially finds dissipates over time, and the time decay is quite fast here – precisely because of the volume of Trump’s posting. Take tariffs for example. Yes, a few posts announcing the end to some tariffs clearly moved markets in April and May 2025. Afterwards, his repeated posts on negotiations either made no reaction, or markets reacted in the opposite direction (meaning they reacted to something else).
If there is a new major event that Trump triggers, you might find a signal initially and test it, but by the time you start trading it, it might already disappear as his policy strategy becomes fully priced in. A good example is the Iran war and the impact it had on oil prices. Granted, we never ran tests on oil or any event in 2026, and there might be a possibility of a signal there, but by the time you capture the signal of trading oil based on his posts, the event is done, and oil becomes far less sensitive to his posts. In other words, what worked this year might not work going forward. Then you must hope for another major disturbance from the administration in order to benefit from Trump’s backing off, and then you must have the clairvoyance to end trading on any posts on that particular topic. Not quite a systematic strategy, is it?
Most importantly, in many instances the posts came over the weekend or when markets were closed. By the time the market opened, the effect was already priced in. Technically, that classifies as a market-moving post, but for the purposes of justifying the $100,000 annual value claim, this information becomes public knowledge before the paying subscriber gets their chance to react. By definition, it doesn’t justify the price tag.
All in all, Truth Social is selling noise. I would taking out a subscription both on principle, and on the fact that you’re buying snake oil.
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