$70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

Summary

On April 9, 2025, someone risked about $2.5 million—and walked away with more than $70 million in under an hour.The trade was simple, but bold: buy a specific kind of option tied to SPY, the exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the S&P 500, the most widely followed index of large-cap U.S. companies. The option—known as a call—gave the buyer the right to purchase SPY at $509 per share. That might not sound strange, except that SPY was trading below $500 when they placed the bet. And the option was set to expire the same day.These are known as zero-day expiry options. They’re cheap because they’re risky. If the market doesn’t move in your favor, they expire worthless. If the market does move, they can pay off massively. But you have to be exactly right on both direction and timing.In this case, the timing was perfect. The trade was placed just before 1:01 pm Eastern Time. At 1:30 pm, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was pausing most of the tariffs he had imposed earlier that month. The market exploded upward. SPY surged well past the 509 mark. Those options that had cost just 85 cents were suddenly worth more than $25.Notice the spike in trade at 17:00 GMT.This was not a small-volume trade. About 30,000 contracts changed hands. That’s a $2.5 million position that turned into more than $70 million. And that’s just one strike. Similar trades occurred in SPY 504, 505, 507, and QQQ contracts as well, suggesting that the total take may have been far larger.It wasn’t just the profit. It was the precision. The market moved before the news. The options were bought before the rally. The volume spiked in contracts that almost never see this kind of interest unless something is expected. And the pattern wasn’t visible on previous trading days. This wasn’t a trend. It was a singular event.And it wasn’t just options. At exactly 1:01 pm EST, trading volume in SPY shares themselves spiked. Nearly 2.75 million shares were bought in that single minute. If those shares wer...