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... Market watchers have been scrutinizing some extremely well-timed options trades just ahead of President Trump's rally-sparking tariff announcement on Wednesday.
Shortly after 1 pm ET on Wednesday, volume spiked in bullish call options on State Street's popular SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, the index-tracking fund better known by its ticker SPY. The surge in activity took place in options that would pay off if SPY's price rose above $509 that day. At 1:06 pm, for instance, an unknown buyer spent about $21,000 to purchase 101 of the contracts, according to derivatives-data firm SpotGamma.
At 1:10 p.m., SPY was trading at about $501"so it would have taken a jump of more than 1.5% for those options contracts to deliver a payday. The trades were in so-called zero-day-to-expiry options, meaning they would have expired worthless within a few hours if markets had dropped.
Instead, at 1:18 p.m. ET, Trump announced in a Truth Social post that he was pausing many of his steepest tariffs for 90 days. The post set off a monster rally: the S&P 500 closed 9.5% higher on Wednesday, one of its biggest one-day jumps in history.
The price of the SPY options surged more than 10-fold. For instance, one changed hands for around $214 at 1:10 p.m. By the end of the trading session, its price had skyrocketed to roughly $3,458, according to Cboe Global Markets data.
Speculation erupted online that the buyers were people with inside knowledge about Trump's tariff move.
"Insane, someone knew," tweeted the X account for data provider Unusual Whales, which was first to draw broad attention to them. ....
