I'm Asking - How Much Money Did Trump Make Over This Last Weekend....
Was it Friday that he came down hard on China with tariffs and the market tanked almost 700 points. Today he was talking a little more forgiving and positively towards China and the market shot back up almost 300 points.
I'm betting he or his family/cronies/Mar-A-Lago members made out both on the downside of the market on Friday and the upside today.
I'm noticing a pattern here. A well placed tweet or comment that creates panic on the market and the market goes down - this is always followed up a couple of days later with another well place tweet or comment to draw the players in the market back to move it up.
It's like he's purposely manipulating the market for his benefit and the benefit of his close family or friends.
Is my tinfoil hat on too tight - or am I on to something?
= new reply since forum marked as read
since you asked...
TL;DR answer - if he started with $4million on Friday morning it could be worth $16 million tonight. Do this just 5 times a year and your $4million turns into $4 billion annually. I don't know about tinfoil but the incentive is certainly there.
Long, drawn out, overly technical version...lol.
Futures are trading instruments developed primarily to help farmers but now predominantly used by speculators to bet on the future price of a commodity (and $$$ are a commodity). It's a very high leverage instrument. As a result, at many futures firms you can "control" about 150k in S&P value for every $4,000 in account value...good if you're profitable but it's the reason why so many futures traders crash/burn quickly.
Assume you've got $4 million just sitting around and you're willing to "risk" it in the futures market. Of course, if you're manipulating the market with china tweets it's not much of a risk, is it?
With that $4 million you could buy or sell 1,000 SP500 futures contracts.
Now - let's look at the market opening on Friday morning. Powell is talking the market up and it rises from the open to about 2930 when trump does his thing and it's down to about 2840. That's 90 points on a 1,000 contracts so if he were to short sell at 2930 and buy at 2840, he's up 90,000 points...at $50/point he's up $4.5 million in PROFIT on his $4 million account.
So he closes the day at $8.5 million. This morning he can buy 2,000 contracts with that account value. The market bottomed about about 2810 when he started talking about how China is all going to work out and we close up about 80 points on 2,000 contract so he's up about 160,000 points...at $50/point he's up another $8 million. Now he's at $16 million and change.
So...in summary. He started with $4 million on Friday morning and tonight he's got $16 million. Certainly nothing a "normal" trader could (or should) expect but when you've got your hand on the wheel like he does, it's easy.
Now - think about how many times he's tweeted out a market moving message over the past months. Assume he only gets half the reaction that he's had in the past couple days...that's still $2-3 million A DAY he can be raking in.
And that's just one single market. Do this for 2-3 weeks and the account has enough value to diversify out into the Treasury futures markets or the NASDAQ futures...these markets can absorb a chitload of volume. Buying/selling 2,000 contracts wouldn't even get noticed in the daily flow of any of these markets.
Again - there is absolutely NO trader that can make this kind of scratch (and nobody should expect to). But when you know the future, it's easy to profit.
It is impossible to know that he's doing this but someone somewhere in his "inner circle" is...and they're literally printing money daily. Add compounding to that and this part of the scheme is like those movies where the thieves stage one crime to keep the police busy while they commit the big one someone else. Think Die Hard (at least #1 and #2).
PS - there's a NY trading company that's spending something like $100 million to bore a hole though some mountains between NYC and Chicago to get a straighter path for fiber optic cable. They estimate it will give them a 2-3millisecond advantage to the market for their orders...in effect giving them the opportunity to see price movement 2-3/1000ths of a second faster than their competition. That's worth $100 million...what would you pay for a 30-60 minute advantage if you could find it. Give me the ability to know the next hour or so of the market with relative certainty and we'll own the world together. Imagine if we could impact the whole day across multiple markets.
PS2 - By the way, future are a zero sum game so for every dollar "won" there's someone with a dollar "lost". Every million TrumpCo makes on this hypothetical deal, someone(s) loses a million. Might be a bank, an investment firm, or some collection of individual traders...but someone is taking the other side of that trade and they're getting creamed daily.
OK - finance class done for the day. time to 
