Two days ago, minutes before the markets went crazy over Donald Trump’s announcement of a suspension of trade tariffs, something strange happened in the options world. Something that, according to many analysts and observers, cannot simply be attributed to chance or intuition.

Just before the announcement, or rather just before that strange invitation by the US president on his homemade Truth Social to ‘buy’ (literally:‘It’s a great time to buy!‘), someone opened a massive number of call options on SPY with strike at 509 and same-day expiry. We are talking about zero-day options, very high-risk instruments that expire in a matter of hours and, unless there is a sudden rally in the S&P 500 index, end up with zero value. Yet, that unexpected rally did occur. And those options, bought for a handful of dollars each, exploded in value in less than an hour, rising 2100%.

Data from Unusual Whales – a platform that monitors abnormal flows in the options market – clearly shows that the volume of those trades was opened from scratch that very day. No rollover of previous positions, no defensive strategy. Just a bold and targeted directional bet in a context of high volatility (IVR at 82%) that should have discouraged precisely this type of trade.

Not only SPY: similar flows were also recorded on $QQ and $TQQ, the Nasdaq-linked ETFs, with weekly positions and expiring on 17 April. Many traders, noting these movements, followed in the wake, loading up additional calls which they then resold for multimillion-dollar profits. A dynamic that, looked at in retrospect, has all the air of a fabricated operation.

How to explain all this?

One hypothesis takes hold: someone was aware of Trump’s decision before it was published and used the advantage to take advantage of it on the market. Someone who was able to exploit confidential information to pull off a multimillion-dollar heist. This is not just speculation: the incredible timing and the nature of the options used make this an almost scholastic example of possible insider trading.

Will the supervisory authorities (SEC in the lead) be called upon to clarify the matter? In the meantime, the financial community and even more so the international political world are wondering: was Donald Trump’s exhortation a few hours before the decision to suspend duties a tactical attempt to cover up what was happening? Does Trump want us to believe that the current upheavals were brought about by the unconditional trust that some investors placed in his words? Allow us to doubt it.