It's hard not to smell a rat. Fifteen minutes before Donald Trump announced his postponement of threatened strikes on Iranian power plants and said there had positive talks with Iran about ending the war, there was a sharp surge in S&P E-Mini Futures trades.

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Trump's announcement, an all caps post on his Truth Social platform, appeared at 7.05am New York time. The flurry of futures trades began at 6.50am.

But smelling a rat is not the same as finding one in the pantry.

Insider trading is notoriously difficult to prove just as the suspicion there has been is almost impossible to dispel. Regardless, the people who made those trades made a lot of money. Understandably, there are now calls to identify who profited from the latest so-called TACO (Trump always chickens out) trade.

Minnesota governor and failed 2024 vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz took to Facebook yesterday, saying America needed to know which officials traded in that flurry of activity 15 minutes before Trump posted about his postponement.

Meanwhile, Iran dismissed Trump's claim there had been talks, saying the postponement announcement was designed to manipulate oil prices and the financial market. Not that one takes anything the Iranian regime says on face value but Trump's post did see Wall Street record its best rally since May last year. Oil prices fell by 10 per cent, also after an unusual flurry of activity in the 15 minutes before Trump's post.

The oil and stock markets aren't alone in raising eyebrows in the way the war is being conducted and profited from.

When Times of Israel journalist Emanuel Fabian recently published a story about an inconsequential missile strike near Jerusalem, he was besieged by people demanding he amend the story to say the projectile had been intercepted and that only debris had fallen. Turns out the people making the threats had lost money on a bet through Polymarket, the online prediction betting site, that Iran would not strike Israel on March 10.

One of the stakeholders in Polymarket, which is banned in Australia, is a venture capital company 1789 Capital owned by Donald Trump Jr, who was made an adviser in August last year after investing millions of dollars in the gambling business.

Suspicion punters are benefiting from inside information is almost inevitable when huge sums are won predicting everything from the abduction of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro to the timing of strikes on Iran by Israel and the US.

And when vast sums are made betting on stock markets beholden to Trump's erratic behaviour and grammatically impoverished social media posts - be they about the war or the on-again, off-again tariff threats - there'll always be that........

© Canberra Times