Selling the Signal

Selling access to a US president used to be hard work.

You needed a hotel ballroom, a rubber chicken dinner and a $1 million table near the stage.

As of yesterday, there’s an API for it.

(That’s an Application Programming Interface for the less-tech inclined — used like an AI-newsfeed)

Trump Media & Technology Group has launched Truth API, its first data-licensing product. From 1 August, institutions can pay for a real-time feed of posts from Trump’s Truth Social, delivered in milliseconds.

The company was refreshingly honest about who this is for. Not journalists. Not fans. High-frequency and algorithmic trading firms that are ‘most impacted by the cost of a delay in information’.

Translation: the machines that trade on Trump’s posts would like them faster, please. And the President’s company is happy to oblige, for a fee.

And I’m sure plenty will pay. Trump announces tariffs, ceasefires, and sanctions on Truth Social before anywhere else.

The ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs landed there first. As does most of the Iran war’s diplomatic theatre. His recent call to impose a 20% fee on the Strait hurt everyone who wasn’t sitting ready with a hair-trigger algorithm.

And if it wasn’t clear who’s gaining, his family trust owns around 41% of the parent company.

So, the world’s fastest traders will now pay the President’s business for early delivery of the President’s policies. Policies he can generate at will, at any hour, on any topic.

It’s a remarkable business model. Most companies have to make a product. This one just has to make news.

Unsurprisingly, ethics lawyers are already calling it ‘a huge conflict of interest’.

To be fair, there’s a commercial logic. Trump Media booked only US$3.7 million in revenue last year against a US$712 million net loss. Something had to give.

Plus, others like X and Reddit also license their data. But no other platform’s star account sets US trade policy. When one post can move oil futures, faster access isn’t a data product. It’s a toll booth on public information.

There’s even a historical archive back to 2022, in case your algorithm wants to backtest the chaos.

And retail investors? They get the news the old-fashioned way. After the machines have had their fill.

The going rate for a heads-up

If this feels like part of a pattern, that’s because it is.

This is the same administration whose US$1.78 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’, a taxpayer pool for the President’s allies born from Trump suing his own IRS and settling with himself, was cut down by a federal judge this week.

Even by Washington standards, suing yourself and winning US$1.78 billion was ambitious.

Then there’s Tehran’s contribution to the drama.

According to new reporting, Iranian negotiators sent a private message to Vice President JD Vance during last month’s talks in Switzerland.

The complaint wasn’t about uranium or sanctions. It was that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were allegedly using inside knowledge of the talks to profit in financial markets, rather than negotiating.

Kushner, for the record, holds no official government role other than being married into the Trump family.

According to the article, Tehran did the maths and arrived at US$9 billion in alleged trading profits by the pair. Then, in a display of hilarious commercial pragmatism, it invoiced for half.

You have to admire the chutzpah on both sides of the table.

The usual caveats apply. The claims rest on a single anonymous Iranian official. The White House flatly denies that any message was sent. And Iran has every incentive to stir the pot.

But you don’t have to be a multimillion-dollar quant to notice the market-moving announcements landing conveniently before Monday’s US open.

And as I covered in May, the President’s blind trust is now trading roughly 58 times a day — nine trades an hour.

Whether the White House is tipping the scales or not, the perception is now baked in.

And now there’s a subscription service to match.

The rules keep moving

It would be comforting to file all this under ‘American problems’.

But the underlying dynamic is universal. The people who write the rules sit closest to the information, and closest to the exits.

Australia’s version is less colourful and more procedural. Nobody here is selling an API to the Lodge.

Instead, we get capital gains tax settings under review. A government reaching for super balances. Family trust reforms and ever-creeping tax brackets.

Add inflation eroding purchasing power, and you get that familiar feeling of working harder while falling further behind.

No individual change is catastrophic. But it can feel like a death by a thousand cuts. You make long-term decisions under one set of rules — then they shift.

Our resident gold analyst Brian Chu has spent years studying that dynamic.

His conclusion is blunt. If you can’t control the rules, build part of your wealth outside the system that keeps changing them.

He’s just released a blueprint showing how he does it; he calls it the ‘Go your own way blueprint’.

Click here to see Brian’s full presentation.