[Karrot_Kream]

Look, no offense here, but if you're this unaware of how oil markets work, and it seems like markets in general work, I suggest doing at least some initial googling before digesting this story.

I realize for some the whole appeal of this kind of story is "look Trump bad" and then to get into the comments about how bad he is to play political sportsball, but insider trading is sadly a bipartisan phenomenon. No question though that this admin is the most brazen about its corruption in my lifetime though.

[hatthew]

My understanding is that an individual works through a brokerage to buy/sell securities on an exchange. The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading. In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be fully anonymous.

What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).

I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out. I was hoping an expert would be able to enlighten us, so we can share informed opinions rather than uninformed opinions.

[Karrot_Kream]

> In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be fully anonymous.

Remember that even if you make USDC on Polymarket, at some point you need to turn that into spendable fiat. Even if you move USDC over to Coinbase, if you move over $800k+, there is no way your new gains will not be met with scrutiny. Once you have that much USDC and no good explanation on how you made it you essentially need to launder the money. There's low hanging fruit to spend crypto on like VPNs and compute, but there's very few ways to launder that much money easily and most importantly cheaply.

> What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).

Yeah if you search around you'll find that this is covered by the STOCK Act [1]. Pretty simple, cursory search.

> The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading.

Borkerages don't build knowledge graphs of their users and the things these users can and cannot trade even if they know who they are. If you've ever held RSUs, there are companies that put trading restrictions on your RSUs but this is a brokerage platform concept, and isn't even universal across brokerages. For the most part brokerages don't care what you make money on. This only becomes a problem if the SEC chooses enforcement action.

One of the simplest ways that insiders come under scrutiny is taking large positions that make the news or move markets (or otherwise soak up lots of liquidity.) Oil is traded in futures, which means each contract is for 1000 barrels. CBK26 right now is priced at $103.73, which means a single contract is worth $103,730. A position of $800k is a pretty standard amount in Brent (though this is a future, so you'll need to post margin which makes this more expensive.) From there it's a game of how likely it is to be caught trading and then prosecuted. If you tell nobody and come under no scrutiny you're golden; sell your position when the time comes and make $$$. Plenty of government positions, like contractors, are not required to disclose under the STOCK Act and so there's almost no likelihood those insiders will come under any scrutiny.

And unlike a Polymarket bet you don't end up making the news when you trade $800k of contracts nor will you run the risk of mistiming your bet and losing your entire bet and then go through the headache of laundering your money out.

> I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out.

No offense but this is a low bar to have. It's all a few web searches away. I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to teach you this in a few turns of conversation. What is the "appropriate" amount of knowledge we should expect an internet commenter to have? I mean posting on HN has to mean something right? Or maybe those days are gone on here.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...

[googlehater]

what's the point of your comment? it's a thread... on a forum of non experts... and he asked a question.