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Comment by danjoc | Hacker News Reader

>yet Twitter is unable to profit from it.

Twitter could front run wall street on Donald Trump tweets.

It does seem like having early access to all tweets would be immensely valuable, even if it was only a second of lead time. (Sure, Trump tweets are valuable on their own, but market info has to be encoded into coarse-grained info about individually useless tweets as well.) Unless they have an explicit policy against it, Twitter must be selling this, right?

New business model: For $1M per tweet, you can have a 50ms head-start on tweets from Trump. Just Trump, just one tier of headstart/pricing. You prepay for the next N tweets. You can set time-ranges (like, "when the markets are open") for when you want to pay for the headstart.

I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right?

Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.

What regulation? Insider trading requires actual insiders; non-insiders are generally allowed to trade on non-public information.

A non insider that posseses material, nonpublic info is not allowed to trade on it until it becomes public.

The sources I can find say there is only a violation when the person trading is an insider or is purposefully tipped off by an insider.

http://www.sandstormgold.com/_resources/policies/SSL_Stock_T...

https://www.sec.gov/answers/insider.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Definition_of_...

The most direct version is here:

> In 1983, Switzer was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an alleged civil violation of the laws prohibiting "insider trading" of securities. He defended himself as having innocently overheard the information while lounging on the bleacher behind some corporate insiders—at a stadium where Switzer was watching his elder son compete in a track meet. The case was tried in Oklahoma City United States District Court (before a special U.S. District Judge appointed from Kansas). The case was dismissed at the conclusion of the Government's case for its failure to demonstrate that there had been any purposeful disclosure to Switzer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Switzer#After_coaching

https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/1986/062086grundfest.pdf#pag...

Do you have a source that says otherwise?

The situation is even more clear for Twitter. If I'm a marine biologist making the world's most detailed measurements of the ocean, I can clearly use this info to buy or sell stock in a fishing company, even if I don't release that info publicly. Likewise, I can sell that info to someone else who makes the trades.

After reviewing the info you provided, I beleive you are mainly right. The only exception i can think of would be a situation where trump possesed inside information due to his position, then shared it via twitter early. That would be a violation, but it gets complex, and im having trouble formulating the exact line.

Thanks for your response!

But this is already common practice with Bloomberg terminals -- banks paying big bucks get 15min earlier information than the public

Prices are not nonpublic info. You can get them a number of ways without using bloomberg. Most people in finance believe in at least semi-efficient markets which means prices are not material anyway

I'm guessing there might some powerful family that would want a cut of the action.

This is the funniest thing I read today. The problem of course is how to trade them.

Got you covered, fam: https://github.com/maxbbraun/trump2cash

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