Wall Street firms pay six figures a month to see his posts before everyone else
A new paid data feed is handing high-frequency trading firms a millisecond head start on US President Donald Trump's market-moving Truth Social posts, and the arrangement now faces a court challenge, regulatory scrutiny, and warnings from securities experts that it tilts the field against everyone else.
The feed, Truth API, delivers posts from 10 of the platform's most-followed accounts, including Trump's own, to subscribers before the public sees them, Reuters reported.
More than 10 firms, mostly high-frequency traders, have signed on at US$60,000 to US$100,000 a month, according to CNN.
Kevin McGurn, interim chief executive of parent company Trump Media & Technology Group, told the company's first analyst earnings call on Monday that customers "will get published and publicly available posts fractionally faster" than everyone else, as reported by CNBC.
The edge matters because Trump routinely uses the platform to break news on tariffs, military action, and other decisions that swing stocks, oil, bonds, and currencies, often before any formal White House statement, CNN noted.
In algorithmic markets, a fraction of a second can decide who profits from the move.
No US regulator has alleged that the feed breaks securities law, and legal scholars disagree on whether it could.
Classic insider-trading cases turn on trading secret, material information in breach of a duty, and Truth Social posts are built to reach the public within moments, which leaves real doubt over whether a head start alone qualifies, Fortune reported.
Richard Painter, a former White House chief ethics counsel, told CBS News that high-frequency firms still carry legal risk, because customers who receive government information through the feed must wait until it is reflected in prices before trading or risk breaking insider-trading rules.
"When you have a market that looks like that, it looks rigged," Tyler Gellasch, chief executive of the Healthy Markets Association and a former US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) counsel, told Fortune, describing a two-tiered market in which a handful of connected insiders hold information others do not.
Renée Jones, a Boston College Law School professor and former SEC director of corporation finance, told the same outlet that material nonpublic information belongs to the government or the public, "not to Truth Social or President Trump."
Trump owns roughly 41 percent of Trump Media through a family trust, Reuters data show, meaning the president profits from the fees.
A sustained loss of confidence could move money, the experts warned.
Investors who conclude the system is rigged "might move their capital elsewhere," Jones told Fortune, and Gellasch said he expects attention to drift toward markets with tougher disclosure rules, "particularly European markets."
Chester Spatt, a Carnegie Mellon professor and former SEC chief economist, argued the core problem is not that faster access exists, since terminals such as Bloomberg's already sell speed, but that a company controlled by the sitting president collects the fees.
Retail investors stand to lose the clearest edge, advocates for small traders told CNBC, warning the feed widens the information gap just as individuals have become a larger market force.
The dispute plays out under US law and before the US regulator, but the exposure travels north: Canadian portfolios holding US-listed equities react to the same posts, and the same asymmetry, whenever Trump moves a market from his account.
Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff asked the SEC in late July to examine whether the feed undermines market integrity, according to Reuters, and Representative Ritchie Torres has pressed the commission to weigh whether it implicates securities law, market-manipulation protections, and broker-dealer duties, per his office.
Trump Media dismisses the criticism, telling CBS News that critics either oppose free markets or misunderstand the line between public and nonpublic information.
The SEC's three sitting commissioners are all Republicans, Reuters noted.
