61 Million Options Trades Per Day Are Leaving Clues – Here’s How to Read Them
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At 6:49 a.m. on March 23, someone placed an $800 million bet that the price of oil was about to drop.
Fifteen minutes later, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. and Iran had held “very good and productive” talks toward ending their conflict. Oil prices dropped more than 10% within minutes.
On an $800 million position, that’s tens of millions of dollars made in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.
That sure is a well-timed bet. And as The Wall Street Journal reported, regulators have been trying to gauge whether an insider with prior knowledge of Trump’s post traded on it – or tipped off someone who did.
It’s just one of several other instances of suspected rigged trading regarding Iran-related announcements in April and May, according to the newspaper.
And these oil traders aren’t the only ones profiting from well-informed trades.
Between 2019 and 2021, an analysis by The New York Times found that at least 97 members of Congress traded stocks in sectors directly overseen by their own committees – defense committee members trading defense stocks, health committee members trading medical device stocks, and so on.
It works. Multiple independent analyses have confirmed that congressional portfolios often outperform the S&P 500 – a phenomenon dubbed the “Pelosi Effect.”
This isn’t one party’s problem. Republicans and Democrats do it in roughly equal measure. But they did nothing illegal. Congress has debated the ban for over a decade. It still hasn’t happened.
And it’s not just these headline-catching incidents, either. This is how Wall Street operates, all the time, in the open.
Big firms rig the market in their favor and spend enormous sums trying to see around corners before the rest of the market does – legally.
- They pay for calls with former executives who can explain what’s really happening inside an industry.
- They buy satellite images of parking lots and shipping ports to estimate a company’s sales before it reports earnings.
- They mine anonymized credit card data to see what people are buying in real time.
There’s an entire industry built around one goal: finding out what’s coming before everyone else does.
I’m a computer programmer by training. I’ve never worked a day of my life on Wall Street. And frankly, I think it’s wrong that these well-connected insiders take the lion’s share of profits in the market by outspending, out-researching, and outmaneuvering regular investors like me and you.
That’s why my team and I have spent the last 10 months building a system that allows the “little guy” to level the playing field.
It flags stocks the moment they show signs of unusual buying from sophisticated investors – often days or weeks before the news that explains it breaks. You don’t need $800 million or a seat in Congress. You just need to know where to look.
Introducing the Smart Money Edge
When sophisticated Wall Street traders know something the rest of us don’t, they don’t just sit on it. They position themselves to profit. And when they do, they leave traces – evidence in the market, before the news ever breaks.
At TradeSmith, we’ve spent years hunting down hidden patterns in the market. Some follow the calendar. Others use machine learning to surface rare anomalies in a stock’s historical data. But one of the most powerful patterns we’ve found is what insiders and smart money are doing right now.
We found a way to track it. We call it the Smart Money Edge.
For a lot of regular investors, the corner of the market where this shows up – options trading – sounds complicated, even a little dangerous. So, they tune it out entirely. That’s an understandable instinct. It’s also a costly one.
The options market isn’t some side room. In 2025, more than 15 billion options contracts changed hands in the U.S. – a sixth straight annual record, averaging 61 million contracts a day. That volume is driven overwhelmingly by the same sophisticated, well-connected investors we’ve been talking about this whole essay.
That’s 61 million clues every day about where sophisticated money thinks a stock is headed next.
You’re not going to find patterns in that data by staring at a screen. But we’ve built a way to track that activity using software. And in our testing, it’s flagged real moves before they happened:
- Rocket Lab (RKLB) jumped 50% in a single day after beating earnings and raising guidance
- Vista Energy (VIST) jumped 32% after a surprise acquisition – even though the stock had been crashing right up until the news broke
- Oscar Health (OSCR) jumped 15% after strong earnings
- GameStop (GME) jumped 70% off a single social media post
That’s what our system does. It tracks how much is being traded in a stock’s options, how it’s being traded, and how that compares to normal – across thousands of stocks, every day.
We then use AI to check whether what’s happening is genuinely unusual for that stock, or just noise.
I’m not going to walk through exactly how it works here. But once you see what it’s flagged – and how far in advance – you’ll understand why we think this is one of the most interesting patterns in the market today.
Don’t Play This Outdated Game
Here’s the part that matters even if you never look into any of this further.
The market you’re investing in today isn’t the same one you learned to invest in. More of it than ever runs on pattern recognition, algorithms, and machines finding things humans can’t.
If your edge is gut feel, cable news, or a “guru” on social media, you’re not just at a disadvantage. You’re playing an older version of the game, against opponents who upgraded years ago.
If you want to see this pattern in action, I’ll be going through it all during my 30-Day Wealth Accelerator event. It kicks off at 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday, Aug. 25.
I’ll show you how we track this activity, the current list of stocks it’s flagged, and how it’s performed in our testing.
I’ll also be taking questions live on Sept. 4. So if you’re skeptical, you can ask me directly. It’s free, and there’s no obligation to do anything with the insights I’ll be sharing. Just make sure to RSVP here.
When you sign up, you’ll get immediate access to the top stock our system is flagging right now. You’ll also have the chance to access a trial version of our software so you can see for yourself how it works.
All the best,
Keith Kaplan
CEO, TradeSmith
P.S. Interestingly, one of the firms that regulators have reportedly been looking into, Qube Research & Technologies, said its bet had nothing to do with the president’s social media post.
Qube said its investment decisions are “model-driven, taking into account a large variety of data sources on a continuous basis, not a directional trade driven by a specific geopolitical comment/update/outcome.”
In other words, it’s using algorithms to scan the market for patterns in publicly available data to tip them off to big upcoming moves. If you want to see how that works – and how you can harness the power of this kind of technology – RSVP for our 30-Day Wealth Accelerator event here.