President’s firm to charge Wall Street $100,000 for millisecond access to social posts

When the President of the United States speaks, financial markets listen – and with good reason. Whether he is addressing trade disputes or military conflicts, Mr Trump’s utterances have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to move global markets, prompting teams of human traders and automated computer systems alike to monitor his statements with the intensity of a hawk circling its prey. It is against this backdrop that Trump Media & Technology Group, the president’s social media venture, has launched a paid data feed designed to give institutional investors the kind of split-second advantage that can translate into substantial profits, a move that has already provoked a chorus of legal and ethical objections.

The service, known as Truth API, provides real-time access to posts from the platform’s "highest-ranking accounts" in milliseconds, according to the company. While TMTG has not explicitly confirmed that the president’s own account is included, with some 13 million followers – the largest on the platform – it is widely assumed that his posts would rank among the most influential, if not the most influential, on the service. The product, which became available to institutional customers on 1 August, is understood to be priced at as much as $100,000 per month for high-speed access, a figure that the Financial Times has reported and which TMTG has not disputed. The company, which is currently loss-making, has indicated that it expects the new venture to provide a steady source of recurring revenue.

The service is aimed primarily at high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms – those entities, as TMTG itself has noted, that are "most impacted by the cost of a delay in information". Such firms deploy automated electronic systems that execute trades at speeds and volumes far beyond human capability, operating on a principle that one investment bank has described as "blink, and you’ll miss it". Each individual transaction may yield only a modest profit, but the sheer velocity and scale of the activity can generate significant returns, making millisecond advantages exceptionally valuable. The question of who has signed up, however, remains shrouded in mystery. TMTG has acknowledged that customers registered prior to the launch date but has declined to specify how many, and a number of major financial institutions – including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citadel Securities and Jane Street – either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries from the BBC.

Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, offered a sceptical assessment of the new offering, describing Truth API as "worthless" to firms that lack the sophisticated infrastructure required to trade at "nanosecond level fast". He suggested that high-frequency trading firms would be the most likely subscribers, not least because they would be motivated by the fear that competitors would gain an edge if they abstained. "This is not for retail investors," he said. "This is not even for sophisticated institutional investors. This data feed is for high-speed traders who have the systems in place and have spent millions and millions of dollars building the systems." His observation that "nobody wants to talk about this stuff" appears to capture the prevailing mood of circumspection among Wall Street insiders.

The political reaction has been swift. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff have written to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US markets regulator, requesting an investigation into whether Truth API contravenes securities law. The SEC has confirmed receipt of the letter but has not indicated whether it intends to pursue the matter. Critics have raised the spectre of insider trading – the illegal practice of making trades based on information not available to the general public – arguing that selling early access to the president’s statements could amount to a form of market abuse. TMTG has vigorously rebutted such suggestions, with a spokesperson asserting that the senators "continue to mischaracterise Truth API either out of ideological opposition to free markets or a failure to grasp the distinction between public and nonpublic information – or, quite possibly, both". The company has further observed that the senators "must have invented a new theory of 'insider trading' based on publicly available information".

The central legal question appears to hinge on whether the information distributed through the service is genuinely public or, rather, non-public material that could confer an unfair advantage. Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer to President George W Bush, offered a stark assessment, telling the BBC that he believed it could indeed be classed as insider trading to sell material and official US government information on the platform before it had entered the public domain. "If I were commissioner of the SEC, I would threaten to resign unless they put a stop to this plan or promise that no posts... that have to do with US government business [will be included]," he said.

Others have noted that TMTG is not operating in a legal vacuum; Mr Saluzzi pointed out that numerous data providers, news organisations and stock exchanges currently operate comparable services, establishing what he termed a "precedent" for the company’s actions. Nevertheless, he conceded that "there's a different story when it comes to ethics". The president, who owns approximately 41 per cent of Trump Media through a trust administered by his children, stands to benefit personally from the venture, a fact that has not escaped his political opponents. "This appears to be an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders," Senators Warren and Schiff wrote in their letter to the SEC, encapsulating the central allegation that threatens to cast a long shadow over the new enterprise.