On Iran war and oil insider dealing

This week, the Financial Times published an article on traders placing $580 million in oil bets ahead of President Trump’s social media post about Iran talks.

The narrative suggests possible insider trading in oil futures around 6:50 AM ET - just 15 minutes before Trump’s post touting “productive” talks with Iran. The attached chart is compelling and news sensational (Fig. 1).

In this post, we examine the same data from different perspectives to assess whether these claims are warranted. Charting is a powerful tool that can be used to push a chosen narrative. However, when the same data are analyzed from another angle, the story can quickly shift.

I will introduce some of the basic tools algorithmic traders use to examine trading data and establish statistical hypotheses.

Figure 2.a shows a volume heatmap, where each column represents a single trading day and the vertical axis shows contracts traded in 15‑minute intervals. Weekend patterns and increased trading volume since the start of the Iran war are clearly visible. Trump’s announcement of “productive talks” on March 23 at 7:04 AM appears as a dark red dot.

Looking more closely at the alleged “insider trading” volume spike at 6:50 AM that day (Fig. 2b), the activity is visible but relatively insignificant compared with trading patterns on other days.

Figure 3 slices the volume data into 20‑minute buckets and compares activity within each bucket across similar trading days.

We see that the volume generated by Trump’s announcement itself ranks #1 within its bucket (07:00–07:20), which is indeed significant. However, the preceding 15‑minute bucket (06:40–07:00) ranks “only” #7 among 78 days investigated.

There is roughly 7/78 = 9% probability this ranking can happen randomly. Is that enough to conclude insider dealing with statistical confidence? Is that enough to conclude insider dealing with statistical confidence?

🗝️ Key points:

• Statistical evidence presented within the major news is in my opinion inconclusive.

• The purpose of this post is not to determine whether insider trading occurred, but to illustrate how superficial charting - without the rigor of statistical hypothesis testing - can be misleading and fuel false narratives.

⚠️DISCLAIMER: Opinions are my own and not those of my employer. Read my profile for full disclaimer.