Mysterious whales have made $2.1B worth trades in a single month

Something unusual has been happening in the oil futures market. 

Four times between late March and late April 2026, enormous sell orders hit Brent crude futures in the minutes or hours before President Donald Trump made a major announcement related to the United States-Israel-Iran conflict. 

Each time, the bets paid off handsomely as oil prices tumbled following the news. 

The total value of these trades now stands at approximately $2.6 billion. This includes $500 million in March and roughly $2.1 billion across April alone.

In market parlance, these are not retail investors but "whales" who can make or break markets with their enormous trades. 

Related: Major Bitcoin whale makes a shocking move after 10 years

Too precise to be a coincidence

The timeline is striking in its consistency, as per a Reuters investigation.

On March 23, anonymous traders placed $500 million on falling oil prices just 15 minutes before Trump announced a delay to threatened attacks on Iranian power infrastructure. 

On April 7, bets worth $950 million hit the market hours before Trump announced a two-week ceasefire. 

On April 17, traders placed $760 million in sell orders some 20 minutes before the Iranian foreign minister posted on social media that the Strait of Hormuz would remain open to commercial shipping. 

Then, on April 22, another $430 million in sell orders, 4,260 lots in total, hit the market between 19:54 and 19:56 GMT, just 15 minutes before Trump announced he would extend the ceasefire indefinitely. 

Brent crude fell from $100.91 to $100.66 on the trades themselves, then cratered to $96.83 in the minute after Trump's announcement, a near $4 drop in under half an hour.

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The anonymous market movers

Trades of this magnitude, executed this precisely and this repeatedly, are not the work of retail investors. 

They require institutional-level capital, sophisticated market access, and the kind of infrastructure only available to major hedge funds, trading houses, sovereign wealth funds, or bank proprietary desks.

Crucially, these whales are not as anonymous as the word implies. When trades are placed on exchanges like Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group or the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the identities behind those accounts are fully visible to the exchanges and to regulators. 

What makes them "anonymous" is simply that this information is not disclosed publicly or to the media. Regulators know exactly who placed these orders. The question is whether what those traders knew, and when they knew it, was legal.

CFTC reportedly initiates investigation

Lawmakers are paying close attention to these market movements.

For instance, on April 22, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Michael Selig and urged the agency to expand its ongoing investigation to include suspicious oil futures trading on declining crude oil prices done just minutes before President Trump announced the extension of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire a day earlier.

Bloomberg reported earlier on April 15 that the CFTC has launched a formal investigation, asking both CME Group and ICE to hand over trading data from their platforms covering the period immediately before each Trump announcement. 

Regulators have been urged to investigate similar suspicious activity on Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market where users bet on real-world outcomes using stablecoins.

According to CBS News, eight Polymarket users placed bets totalling $70,000 on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire just before Trump's announcements, mirroring the same pattern seen in oil futures, just at a far smaller scale. 

In crypto, these whales were are comparatively less anonymous. This is because of the inherent principle of blockchain technology that each transaction, however big or small, should be traceable. Although the real identity of whales in crypto is still obscure, at least it is visible, unlike the traders in oil futures.

TheStreet Roundtable reached out to ICE, CME Group, and CFTC for comments. ICE declined to comment, while others were yet to respond by the time of publication.

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