Michael Hiltzik’s knee-jerk outrage over Donald Trump’s early-access Truth Social posts is a masterclass in financial naivety. Moralizing commentators love to clutch their pearls whenever high-speed traders or deep-pocketed institutions get a fraction-of-a-second jump on retail investors. They call it ethically repugnant. They call it a corrupt betrayal of the public.
They are dead wrong.
What the outrage machine treats as a scandalous breach of market integrity is actually standard operating procedure in every liquid market on Earth. Financial markets do not exist to enforce fairness, equality, or democratic feelings. They exist to price information.
The Illusion of the Level Playing Field
The underlying premise of the moral outrage is that retail day-traders and trillion-dollar hedge funds ought to stand on identical footing. It is a comforting myth fed to amateur traders to keep them depositing money into brokerage accounts.
In the real world, the "level playing field" has never existed.
When a corporate CEO speaks at an exclusive, closed-door institutional conference in London, attending analysts pay tens of thousands of dollars for seats. They analyze tone, body language, and non-verbal cues before the transcript ever hits a public wire service. When hedge funds purchase satellite imagery of retail parking lots or scrape supply chain bills of lading, they pay millions to front-run quarterly earnings reports.
Is paying for proprietary alternative data illegal? No. Is it accessible to a teenager trading options on a phone? Absolute not.
Buying high-speed data pipelines, direct exchange co-location, or priority information feeds is simply the modernized version of buying a faster horse. Calling early access to a public figure’s social media posts "ethically repugnant" ignores how information discovery actually functions.
Markets are not public utilities. They are hyper-competitive arenas where speed, capital, and access naturally win.
Legal Reality Beats Moral Posturing
Hiltzik correctly acknowledges the law, but treats it as a loophole rather than a deliberate, structural boundary.
Under current U.S. law, insider trading requires a breach of fiduciary duty or a duty of trust and confidence. Standard market manipulation requires fraudulent intent or deceptive devices.
- No Fiduciary Duty: A private citizen or political figure publishing commentary on a platform they own owes no fiduciary duty to general stock market participants.
- Public Information Fees: Charging a premium for high-speed delivery of information isn't fraud; it's a subscription model. Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and news wire services have monetized low-latency delivery for decades.
- The Commodity of Speed: Paying for direct access to data streams at the source is the fundamental business model of modern high-frequency trading (HFT).
If a media personality or politician sends a signal to a paid tier of subscribers five seconds before posting it to the general public, they have not committed securities fraud. They have monetized their bandwidth. Demanding that everyone receive information simultaneously is a fundamental misunderstanding of physics and network infrastructure. Information takes time to travel. Someone will always be first.
Why Speed Sells (And Why Retail Always Loses the Latency Race)
Let us run a thought experiment. Imagine a scenario where a platform forces every single user, server, and algorithm to wait for a synchronized global clock before releasing a post.
What happens?
The algorithm with the fastest execution speed at the exchange level still wins. The institution with co-located servers adjacent to the NASDAQ data centers in Carteret, New Jersey will execute trades in microseconds, while a retail trader's order takes hundreds of milliseconds just to route through an app interface.
You cannot engineer equal outcomes in a latency-sensitive ecosystem.
[Information Source]
│
├──> Paid Direct Feed (Microseconds) ──> Algorithmic Execution
│
└──> Public Distribution (Milliseconds) ──> Retail Brokerage App
By focusing on the seller of the feed, critics avoid the uncomfortable truth: retail traders are not losing money because a VIP got a post five seconds early. They are losing money because they are bringing consumer-grade tools to an industrial-grade fight.
The Dangerous Fallacy of Regulating Speech Feeds
Proposing regulatory crackdowns on how public figures distribute their online statements creates a terrifying precedent.
If regulators dictate that a public figure cannot charge for early access to their writing, where does that mandate end? Should Substack creators be banned from sending newsletters to paid subscribers before posting them on Twitter? Should financial media outlets be prohibited from publishing paywalled breaking news?
Attempting to criminalize latency differentials under the banner of "ethics" would cripple financial journalism and commercial speech.
I have spent years watching retail investors demand protections that ultimately restrict their own access. Regulators stepped in to "protect" retail traders with pattern day trader rules, effectively locking small accounts out of risk management strategies while leaving institutional desks untouched. Expanding legal definitions to punish fast data delivery will yield the exact same result.
Stop Crying Corruption and Understand the System
The real outrage isn't that early access feeds exist. The real outrage is that financial commentators keep selling the public the lie that markets are supposed to be fair.
If you are trading based on social media posts, you are already at the bottom of the food chain. The algorithms have already priced in the headline, traded the reaction, and closed out their positions before your app screen even finishes refreshing.
Instead of demanding government intervention every time a politician or executive monetizes their audience, accept the fundamental rule of modern market mechanics:
Access costs money. Speed costs more money. If you aren't paying for the pipe, you are the liquidity.
