No Reg FD for policy

Truth API goes live today. For $100,000 a month a trading firm gets a direct feed of Donald Trump's Truth Social posts — the same channel where he announces tariffs, weighs in on central bank leadership, and names companies he likes. AP reported Friday that three subscribers would double Trump Media's revenue. The company took in $3.7 million last year.

Trump Media's answer to the criticism is that subscribers and the public receive the posts simultaneously, so no nonpublic information changes hands. That answer is correct. It is also the entire problem. Insider trading law polices what you know. This is a business that sells when you receive it, and we have no rule that measures that.

Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading put the distinction plainly to AP, and it is the sentence the whole dispute turns on:

Release time and receipt time are different numbers, and only the second one is for sale. The $100,000 monthly price is the market's own estimate of what the gap is worth — $1.2 million a year per seat, in a business where the trade closes in thousandths of a second. Saluzzi puts the addressable market at roughly a hundred firms. That is a priced, liquid market in a quantity no securities rule names.

A rule that asks what you knew will always clear a business that sells when you knew it.

We have been here before and built the wrong instrument. Regulation Fair Disclosure, adopted in 2000, exists to stop exactly this shape of transaction: an issuer handing material information to a favored subset ahead of everyone else. Reg FD works because the SEC can point at an issuer and a security and demand simultaneous, non-exclusionary release. Truth API satisfies that test on its face. Nothing is withheld; the feed is just faster. And even if it failed the test, the rule would not reach here — a tariff is not a security and a president is not a registrant. The disclosure regime returns a clean bill of health on a transaction that anyone can see is a conflict, because it is measuring content when the product is latency.

The honest objection is that selling speed is the market-data industry. Exchanges rent colocation by the rack. Dow Jones and Bloomberg have sold low-latency wires for decades, and AP notes other platforms sell fast feeds too. All true — and every one of those sellers is a distributor. Reuters does not decide when the tariff lands. Here the newsmaker, the publisher, and the equity holder are one person, and the supply of market-moving posts is a dial he controls. Craig Holman of Public Citizen expects that dial to turn: if the losses keep mounting, more policy moves onto the platform. "That's absolutely going to happen," he told AP.

Trump Media's stock is down 75% since the inauguration, and the company has finally found a product with real demand. It is not the platform. It is the timestamp. The rules we wrote govern people who issue stock; nobody ever wrote one for people who issue policy.