President Trump, his critics like to say, learned one major lesson during his first term: Never leave any money on the table.But even for a president who raked in $2 billion, fueled mostly by his lucrative cryptocurrency ventures, the latest offering from his social media platform, Truth Social, stands out.Trump Media & Technology Group is now shopping to traders and investors a premium version of Truth Social delivering early access to the feeds of high-profile users, including the president.Starting Saturday, for a fee of up to $100,000 a month, trading firms can access "Truth API" to get a glimpse of the president's often market-moving announcements about economic policy and global affairs before the rest of the world.Trump's media company says customers have already started signing up.Such an offering would give institutional investors a leg up in areas of finance like high-frequency trading, where an advantage of a few milliseconds can mean the difference of millions of dollars.
But will the service be widely adopted across Wall Street?"It's insane," said one Wall Street executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration."I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we're not getting anywhere near this.
In another administration, this would be considered criminal."NPR reached out to 12 other major players in finance, brokers, hedge fund managers and other investors.None would speak publicly about the service, with some saying the risk of landing in Trump's crosshairs was too high.Securities experts, however, are drawing attention to the legal concerns surrounding the service.Renée Jones, a Boston College professor and former top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the paid offering appears to run afoul of insider trading laws.She pointed to federal securities laws prohibiting schemes in which non-public information is misused to give a trader an unfair advantage.
The law states that sh...