Well-timed options trades ahead of Trump's tariff pause draw questions

NEW YORK, April 10 (Reuters) - In the minutes before President Donald Trump's social media post on Wednesday pausing tariffs sent the U.S. stock market rallying, some unidentified options traders placed bets worth millions of dollars that the market would rebound, data shows.

The well-timed bets likely paid off handsomely. Now, some Democratic lawmakers are calling for investigations into whether Trump's policy reversal led to any market manipulation or insider trading.

Betting on short-term market swings is common and the trades in question could easily have been placed without any prior knowledge of the coming news as traders speculate on a market bounce or hedge against one every day.

And some market experts said a record surge in options trading volume due to the market's wild gyrations in recent days, coupled with the fast-moving pace of market-moving news, makes it hard to put a finger on suspicious trading.

"There's no way to know if that buyer at that moment just had lucky timing (or not)," said Henry Schwartz, vice president, market intelligence at Cboe Global Markets.

"I haven't found any smoking gun," he said.

Bets in options markets, where traders use equity derivatives, often appear in insider trading cases. They allow traders to bet on the direction of the market or individual stocks without having to make a large upfront commitment...
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