May 12, 2026
Weeks after the White House sent an email to staffers warning them against using confidential information to place trades on financial markets, more questionable oil market activity is raising suspicions.
Well-timed oil bets that seemed to be able to predict the future started making headlines in March. Using prediction market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi, prescient bettors were able to capitalize on fluctuating oil prices just before President Trump made major announcements on the war in Iran.
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But it's not just oil bets that are winning big. In April, an American soldier was arrested on accusations that he leveraged classified information to make bets on the operation that captured former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Trump later told reporters that he's "not happy with any of that stuff."
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Suspicions of insider trading were heightened even further on May 6, when $1.7 billion worth of oil contracts changed hands just an hour before a report from Axios sent oil prices tumbling.
More suspicious bets
As MarketWatch reports, trading in U.S. crude futures spiked on May 6 just before Axios published a report that America and Iran could be closing in on a deal to end the war (1).
Axios' report (2) — which was published at around 4:50 a.m. Eastern time — caused West Texas Intermediate oil futures to fall 7%. Meanwhile, roughly 17,300 oil contracts with an estimated value of nearly $2 billion had already been traded.
MarketWatch spoke with several oil-market experts who believe the suspicious activity could be an indication that someone with advanced knowledge of a potential end to the war was trading ahead of Axios' report.
"All federal employees are subject to government ethics guidelines that prohibit the use of nonpublic information for financial benefit," Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, shared with MarketWatch. "However, any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Bloomberg reported in April that The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating these suspicious oil futures trades and their suspected connection to Trump's announcements on the Iran war (3). And while a CFTC representative told MarketWatch that the agency can't confirm or deny such an investigation, the Department of Justice has reportedly opened its own probe into the matter (4).
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'I was never much in favor of it'
As the DOJ began investigating these controversial oil price bets, Trump shared his distaste for prediction markets with reporters.
"I was never much in favor of it," Trump said from the Oval Office, according to the New York Times (5). "I don't like it conceptually. It is what it is."
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The president's family, however, is heavily invested in the prediction market industry. In fact, Trump Media & Technology Group recently announced it would be launching its own prediction market platform called Truth Predict (6).
Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son and a director of Truth Social, has also invested in Polymarket and serves as an unpaid advisor to the platform. He serves as an advisor to Kalshi as well.
With this arrangement, the president's prediction market comments seem to clash directly with his family's current business endeavors. And while he says that he doesn't favor prediction markets at all, in 2025, the Trump administration reportedly backed away from enforcing oversight measures against Polymarket (7).
"Presidential statements used to be the gold standard, but this is not true for President Trump," Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, told the NYT (5). "What he does is more important than what he says. I don't think his comments will bother the prediction markets in the least."
Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
MarketWatch (1); Axios (2); Bloomberg (3); The Independent (4); The New York Times (5),(7); Blockworks (6)
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Chase is an Associate Editor for Wise Publishing. He formerly worked at Yahoo Canada as an editor on both the News and Sports teams.
