One Tweet. $1.7 Trillion. And a Lie Iran Denied in 45 Minutes.

Trump posted something before breakfast. Markets went wild. Then Iran said it never happened. Half the money vanished. Everyone is calling it manipulation — but that’s not the scary part. The scary part is that it keeps working. Here’s why.

On 23 March 2026, at 7:05 a.m., Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the US and Iran had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.”

In the time it takes to walk from your car to your desk, $1.7 trillion moved in global stock markets. Oil dropped 15% in minutes. The Dow jumped 1,100 points. All of this before the stock market even opened for the day.

Then, 45 minutes later, Iran said: that never happened. There were no talks. No conversations. Nothing. Iran’s parliament speaker called it “fake news used to manipulate the financial and oil markets.” Half the gains disappeared almost immediately.

People were furious. A US senator called it “mind-blowing corruption.” A Nobel Prize-winning economist used the word treason. Someone had also placed $580 million in oil bets in a single minute, fifteen minutes before the post — which has never been explained.

Everyone is focused on whether this is illegal. That’s understandable. But it’s the wrong question. The bigger issue is: why does this keep happening, and why does it keep working?

Related: How the Iran war broke gold’s safe-haven status → Gold’s Paradox: Why the Crisis Metal Crashed in the Biggest Crisis of Our Era

The TACO Trade Pattern — Every Episode, Explained

To understand March 23, you need to go back to April 2025. On what Trump called “Liberation Day,” he signed an order slapping heavy taxes (called tariffs) on imports from almost every country on Earth. Think of it as suddenly charging every foreign product at the border.

Markets panicked. The S&P 500 — the main index that tracks the 500 biggest US companies — dropped 12%. The Dow Jones lost 4,600 points in four days. Trillions in people’s savings and pension funds evaporated.

Then, at 9:37 a.m. on 9 April, Trump posted: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”

Less than four hours later, he announced he was pausing almost all of those tariffs for 90 days. Markets exploded upward. The S&P jumped 9.5%. Nearly $4 trillion in market value was added back in a single day.

A financial journalist at the Financial Times named Robert Armstrong noticed this pattern and gave it a name: TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea is simple: Trump makes a scary threat, markets crash, investors panic-sell. Then Trump backs down, markets recover, and anyone who stayed calm (or bought during the panic) makes money. NBC News went back and documented this happening ten separate times. The strategy got its own Wikipedia page. Wall Street started running it like a scheduled trade. One of the biggest banks on the planet — Citi — even wrote a note to their clients before the Iran episode, predicting exactly what was about to happen:

Chart · Brent Crude Oil · Daily · Mar 25, 2026

The TACO trade in one chart — Brent crude surges 60% on the Iran war, then collapses on a single post

Source: TradingView · CFDs on Brent Crude Oil (UKOIL) · 1D Chart by @ADZO · adezeno.com

Citi wrote that down before it happened. They saw it coming. Because they had seen it before. Ten times.

Why Trump's Truth Social Posts Move Markets in Minutes

Here’s how $1.7 trillion moves before you finish your morning coffee.

The first ones to react to Trump’s post are not human traders sitting at desks. They are computer programs — algorithms — that scan social media 24 hours a day and automatically place trades based on what they read. These programs have been trained on years of data. They know that when Trump posts certain words in a certain tone, markets have historically moved in a specific direction.

So when the words “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” appeared on Trump’s account at 7 a.m., the algorithm didn’t stop to ask: did these conversations actually happen? It asked: the last ten times Trump used language like this, what happened to stock prices and oil prices? The answer was clear. Stocks went up. Oil went down. So it bought stocks and sold oil — automatically, in milliseconds.

Here is the part that should make you stop and think: the post doesn’t need to be true to make money. The computers don’t care about truth. They care about patterns. And the pattern is: Trump posts something that sounds like good news, markets jump, Trump usually follows through with something (even a small something) that keeps prices up long enough to exit.

By the time Iran called it a lie, the profit had already been taken. The lie had already done its job.

The Conflict of Interest Nobody Can Ignore

Here is where it gets even more uncomfortable.

Trump owns roughly 53% of the company that owns Truth Social — the app he uses to make all these posts. That company is called Trump Media, and its stock ticker on the market is DJT — his initials.

When Trump ended his “great time to buy” post on 9 April 2025 with the letters “DJT,” the stock market surged. But DJT the stock — Trump’s own company — surged even more: 22.67% in one day. Trump’s personal stake in that company went up by $415 million in 24 hours. Was “DJT” his signature, or was he telling people to buy his stock? Nobody has given a clear answer.

Now think about the full picture. The same person:

• Makes the policies he posts about
• Posts about them on an app he owns
• Profits when markets react to his posts
• Controls the government agencies that are supposed to investigate whether any of this is illegal

The rules were never written to handle this situation. Because nobody imagined a sitting president would own the platform he uses to move markets, while simultaneously controlling every regulator that could hold him accountable.

The US Senate wrote a formal letter demanding an investigation. Legal experts said prosecution would be difficult because Trump created the information himself — he wasn’t stealing a secret from someone else, he was making decisions and then posting about them. The White House said there was no wrongdoing. No investigation has found otherwise.

Meanwhile, $580 million in oil bets were placed in a single minute, fifteen minutes before the post. No one has explained that.

The Problem Nobody Is Talking About: Markets Have Learned

Here is what nobody is saying loudly enough.

Even if Trump leaves office tomorrow, the damage to how markets work is already done. Every algorithm that successfully ran the TACO trade has learned a lesson: presidential social media posts move prices, regardless of whether they’re true. That lesson is now encoded into the computers that manage trillions of dollars.

And it gets stranger. The more people believe Trump will always back down, the more the pattern becomes self-fulfilling. Here’s how: when markets crash after a Trump threat, the financial pain becomes real — pension funds shrink, businesses halt investment, headlines turn ugly. That pressure is what forces Trump to back down. So the TACO trade isn’t just predicting his behaviour. It is, in part, causing it. The retreat happens partly because enough people bet on it.

What Trump has stumbled into — whether deliberately or not — is the most powerful position in global finance: he is both the person who creates the panic and the person who ends it. He controls both ends of the trade. The crash is his. The recovery is his. And the only question that matters to the people making money is: how long until he blinks?

So What Should You Actually Do?

There is no perfect answer. But here is how to think more clearly about it.

Don’t panic-sell when Trump makes a scary announcement. Liberation Day wiped 12% off the market. Investors who sold locked in that loss. Investors who held — or better, who added — recovered nearly everything within weeks. The TACO pattern means that big crash-and-reverse moves driven by Trump posts are more likely to bounce back than crashes caused by real economic problems. A company going bankrupt is real. A tweet is, often, negotiation.

Don’t chase the spike either. When the Iran post hit, $1.7 trillion moved in minutes. By the time you read the news and decided to buy, the computers had already made their money and were selling. The person buying the rally at 7:10 a.m. was buying what the algorithm was offloading. You don’t want to be on that side of the trade.

Related: How to read the bond market for early warning signals → The Bond Market’s Crystal Ball for Stocks

Learn to tell the difference between a Trump panic and a real crisis. A real crisis leaves marks. When things are genuinely bad, fear spreads everywhere — companies struggle to borrow money, bond markets signal distress for days or weeks, volatility stays high. A TACO event looks completely different: prices spike or crash dramatically, then quietly settle back within hours. If the dust has settled by lunchtime, it was probably TACO.

Focus on what posts can’t change. A company’s profits don’t disappear because of a Truth Social post. A great business with real cash flow and a strong balance sheet is still a great business the day after the panic. Short-term TACO events create dips in quality assets. Those dips are opportunities, not warnings.

Accept the world as it is, not as it should be. We are investing in a market where one person’s unverified social media post can move more money than most countries produce in a day. That is strange. It is unsustainable. But it is real. Pretending your investment strategy exists in a normal world when it clearly doesn’t will cost you money.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendations, or an offer to buy or sell any security. All opinions are the author’s own. Past market patterns do not guarantee future results. Please consult a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decisions.