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The Trump family’s media group is asking large trading firms to pay for ultrafast access to the US president’s often market-moving posts on Truth Social.
Trump Media & Technology Group on Thursday announced the launch of a new data feed called Truth API that it said would provide “real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts”.
TMTG is majority owned by the Trump family and controls Truth Social, where Donald Trump has 12.9mn followers. Selling near-instant access to the president’s posts would advance its strategy to “monetise proprietary assets”, said interim chief executive Kevin McGurn.
Truth API would deliver Trump’s posts to customers “milliseconds” before those posts reach the public, the company added. API stands for application programming interface, a mechanism that allows two sets of software to share information.
Trump’s frequent posts on topics ranging from the Iran war to US stocks have repeatedly triggered violent gyrations across financial markets, adding or erasing billions of dollars of value from assets as algorithmically driven trading strategies automatically process and respond to his announcements.
The high-frequency trading firms that respond fastest to new information — including economic data and posts on popular forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets — have an edge over their peers.
Most HFTs make tens of thousands of tiny trades a day and spend millions of dollars a year on physical infrastructure and data licensing agreements to shave trillionths of a second off the time it takes to execute these positions.
“Until now . . . firms that prioritise tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring,” TMTG said. “Truth API closes the gap for organisations that place a premium on immediate, verified access to information.”
Trump also uses Truth Social to post videos, photos and AI-generated content. In February the president removed a post that included a racist meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
TMTG’s announcement on Thursday comes six months after the company said it was considering spinning off Truth Social ahead of its proposed $6bn merger with Google-backed fusion energy company TAE Technologies.
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TAE and TMTG have said they hope to begin work later this year on a power plant to meet the soaring energy demands of AI.
TMTG did not disclose how much it planned to charge for Truth API but said it had signed up customers ahead of the product’s launch in August. The company reported a net loss of $405mn in the three months to the end of March, compared with a loss of $31mn in the same period a year before.
In March, traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Trump used Truth Social to tout “productive” talks with Iran. The post sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.
Source:
www.ft.com
