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The Swing-Trading Presidency: Trump, Iran, Tariffs & Market Volatility
Trump’s second presidency has turned tariffs, Iran, oil and presidential communication into powerful sources of market volatility. Bullish Cartel examines the evidence, market-integrity questions and what the new political-risk regime means for investors.
Bullish Cartel Research
10min
Financial markets have always traded politics. Elections move currencies, wars reprice commodities, tax policy changes earnings forecasts and central-bank appointments shift bond yields. What has distinguished Donald Trump’s second presidency is not simply the scale of the policy changes, but the speed with which they can be announced, threatened, negotiated, delayed or reversed — and the enormous amounts of capital that can move in between.
The result is a market environment Bullish Cartel describes as the “Swing-Trading Presidency”: a period in which presidential communication itself has become a significant source of tradable volatility.
The term is deliberately descriptive rather than accusatory. There is no basis in the evidence examined for this article to conclude that Trump is personally trading around policy announcements, or that he has committed insider trading or securities manipulation. There is, however, ample evidence that his statements and policy decisions have repeatedly produced exceptional movements across equities, bonds, currencies and commodities. The circumstances surrounding some of those episodes have also prompted lawmakers to raise legitimate questions about information controls, conflicts of interest and whether people with advance knowledge of government decisions could potentially profit from them.
Those are different propositions, and credible market analysis requires keeping them separate.
What is already observable is significant enough: investors increasingly have to analyse not only American policy, but Trump’s negotiating behaviour itself. A tariff threat may be an intended policy, an opening bargaining position or both. A geopolitical escalation can place a substantial risk premium into oil, while a subsequent indication of negotiations can remove it. A presidential social-media post can alter expectations before analysts have finished reading the underlying policy documents.
For investors, information about what the US government might do next has become an asset in its own right.
The April shock
The defining episode came during the tariff crisis of April 2025.
Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement introduced sweeping reciprocal tariffs and forced investors to reconsider assumptions about global trade, inflation, corporate margins and economic growth. The initial equity sell-off rapidly developed into something more serious as recession concerns intensified and instability spread into parts of the Treasury market.
That transmission mattered. Falling equities are painful, but disorder in US government bonds has consequences far beyond Wall Street. Treasury yields underpin borrowing costs throughout the American economy and provide reference rates for assets around the world. Once investors began selling Treasuries alongside risk assets, the tariff confrontation was no longer simply an equity-market event.
Trump later acknowledged the pressure in the bond market, saying investors had become “a little yippy” and describing the market as “tricky.” The episode suggested that while the administration might tolerate considerable equity volatility in pursuit of its negotiating objectives, instability in Treasuries represented a more consequential constraint.
Then came April 9.
At 9:37 a.m. in New York, Trump posted on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”
Several hours later, he announced a 90-day pause on the higher reciprocal tariffs for most countries while retaining a 10% baseline tariff and intensifying the confrontation with China.
The reaction was extraordinary. The S&P 500 surged 9.5%, its strongest session since the global financial crisis, while the Nasdaq Composite gained more than 12%. Roughly a week of escalating fear was partially unwound in a single session.
Nothing comparable had happened to the underlying productive capacity of the US economy during those few hours. What changed was the information available to investors.
That distinction sits at the centre of the Swing-Trading Presidency. Government policy had created the initial shock; a government decision then produced the reversal. Investors positioned between those two events experienced radically different outcomes depending largely on when they received and acted upon information.
The market-integrity question
The sequence inevitably attracted scrutiny.
Democratic lawmakers subsequently called for investigations into whether administration officials, associates or other individuals could have traded with advance knowledge of the tariff pause. The proximity between Trump’s public encouragement to buy and the subsequent announcement made the episode politically explosive.
It is important not to extend that evidence beyond what it establishes.
Trump’s post is public record. The tariff reversal and subsequent market rally are public record. Lawmakers’ requests for investigations are also public record. None of those facts, individually or collectively, establishes that Trump or another identifiable person engaged in insider trading.
Proving such conduct would require considerably more: evidence showing who possessed material non-public information, when they possessed it, whether securities were traded on the basis of that information, and whether the relevant legal requirements were satisfied.
The more important institutional question is broader.
Advance knowledge of a major presidential policy reversal can potentially be worth enormous amounts of money. When a single announcement is capable of moving trillions of dollars of market capitalisation, controls governing access to that information become critically important regardless of which political party occupies the White House.
The April episode therefore matters even without evidence of an underlying offence. It demonstrated the extraordinary economic value attached to the timing of presidential information.
Markets learned to trade the negotiation
April was not an isolated example.
During the tariff turmoil, even an erroneous report suggesting the administration was considering a 90-day tariff pause was sufficient to generate a sharp intraday market reversal before the White House denied it. The episode showed how sensitive investors had become not simply to tariff policy, but to the possibility that Trump might retreat from an initially aggressive position.
Subsequent negotiations reinforced that behaviour.
A US-China tariff truce in May 2025 produced another substantial rally after Washington and Beijing agreed to sharply reduce tariff rates while negotiations continued. Trump separately threatened a 50% tariff against the European Union before delaying its implementation following discussions.
Wall Street eventually attached an irreverent acronym to the strategy: TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Trump objected publicly to the phrase, but the trade itself reflected a serious change in market psychology. Investors were beginning to distinguish between Trump’s opening negotiating position and the policy ultimately implemented.
That distinction has important consequences.
If investors believe an extreme threat will eventually be moderated, selling immediately on every escalation becomes less attractive. Traders instead begin attempting to anticipate the point of maximum pressure — and the potential reversal that follows.
In effect, the President’s negotiating behaviour becomes part of the market’s reaction function.
Investors have long studied the Federal Reserve this way. Markets analyse how policymakers are likely to respond to inflation, unemployment, financial stress and deteriorating credit conditions. Under Trump, a similar analytical framework has increasingly been applied to the presidency: How much market pain will the administration tolerate? What would force a policy adjustment? Does weakness in equities matter? Does disorder in Treasuries matter more? How sensitive is the White House to oil prices, gasoline prices or inflation expectations?
These are no longer purely political questions. They affect asset prices.
The danger, of course, is that successful patterns eventually become crowded.
If investors become convinced that Trump will always retreat from an aggressive opening position, the risk eventually shifts in the opposite direction. A threat that is unexpectedly implemented can produce a more violent repricing precisely because the market had learned to discount it.
There is no permanent free trade in financial markets, including the trade built around presidential reversals.
Iran moved the trade into oil
Tariffs transmitted political volatility primarily through equities, currencies and bonds. Iran moved the same phenomenon directly into energy.
The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz makes the transmission unusually powerful. US Energy Information Administration data show that approximately 20.9 million barrels a day of petroleum liquids moved through the strait during the first half of 2025, equivalent to roughly one-fifth of global petroleum-liquids consumption. Alternative pipeline capacity is insufficient to replace those volumes in the event of a serious and prolonged disruption.
A confrontation involving Iran therefore has implications far beyond the Middle East.
Oil affects transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and household energy costs. It feeds into inflation expectations, which affect bond yields and expectations for monetary policy. Those yields, in turn, influence equity valuations, currencies, housing and financing conditions.
For the resources sector, oil has an additional significance: it is an important direct and indirect mining cost.
The June 2025 confrontation between Israel and Iran demonstrated the mechanism. Israeli strikes caused crude prices to rise as traders priced the possibility of a wider regional conflict and potential disruption to Hormuz. The subsequent US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities forced markets to assess whether the confrontation was about to expand further.
Iran retaliated against the US Al Udeid air base in Qatar. Yet the nature of the response and subsequent diplomatic signals began changing expectations about escalation. When Trump announced a ceasefire, a substantial portion of the geopolitical premium embedded in crude was quickly removed.
The sequence bore similarities to the tariff episodes, but with a crucial difference: this time presidential diplomacy was influencing the price of the commodity sitting near the beginning of the global inflation chain.
By 2026, the issue had become structural rather than episodic.
Negotiations over reopening and normalising traffic through Hormuz have repeatedly shifted expectations for physical oil supply. In August, disagreement between Washington and Tehran again complicated the outlook, with Iran tying reopening conditions to US concessions and Trump making counter-demands, including compensation connected with casualties during the conflict.
Crude responded immediately. Oil prices rose sharply as expectations for a rapid resolution deteriorated, with Brent trading around US$88 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate around US$82 on August 11. Shipping data reported at the time also indicated that traffic through Hormuz remained materially below recent averages.
This was not simply geopolitical sentiment expressed through futures markets. Physical shipping, tanker availability, insurance, freight costs and supply chains were involved.
Presidential diplomacy had become a variable in the physical commodity market.
From tariffs to copper and gold
The same information structure has appeared elsewhere in commodities.
Copper provided one of the clearest examples. When the Trump administration signalled a 50% tariff on copper imports in 2025, the prospect of trade restrictions created a significant distortion between US copper prices and international benchmarks as traders attempted to determine which products would ultimately fall within the tariff regime.
The final implementation differed materially from what parts of the market had anticipated. Refined copper was excluded, triggering a violent reversal in US copper futures.
The long-term fundamentals of copper had not suddenly disappeared. What changed was the regulatory assumption embedded in the price.
Gold experienced a related episode when uncertainty emerged over whether imported gold bars could become subject to US tariffs. The prospect was sufficiently disruptive to create confusion across physical and futures markets before Trump stated that gold would not be tariffed.
These episodes illustrate why policy risk has become particularly important for commodity investors.
A strong structural thesis can coexist with severe short-term volatility when government action alters trade flows, tariffs or market access. Investors analysing copper demand from electrification or gold demand from central banks can still be caught on the wrong side of a policy event that temporarily overwhelms those longer-term fundamentals.
The Federal Reserve adds another dimension
The administration’s confrontation with the Federal Reserve extends the same phenomenon into monetary policy.
Trump has repeatedly criticised the central bank and argued for lower interest rates. The significance extends beyond the political debate over Federal Reserve independence.
Tariffs can increase price pressure. Geopolitical disruption can increase energy costs. Higher energy prices can influence inflation expectations. Inflation influences the Federal Reserve’s policy choices, while expectations for those choices influence the dollar, Treasury yields, equities and precious metals.
These variables cannot be analysed independently.
A tariff announcement that is positive for a protected domestic industry may simultaneously increase inflation expectations. A confrontation with Iran may initially support gold through safe-haven demand while also increasing oil prices and therefore mining costs. A ceasefire may reduce crude prices, ease inflation expectations and alter expectations for interest rates — all while gold remains historically elevated.
The headline is only the beginning of the analysis.
The conflict-of-interest issue
Trump’s private financial interests add another layer of scrutiny.
Financial disclosures during his second presidency have documented substantial income and holdings across businesses, real estate, cryptocurrency-related ventures and financial assets. Subsequent disclosures have also reported purchases of corporate and municipal bonds.
The White House has said investment decisions are handled independently by third-party financial institutions.
That distinction is material. Ownership of financial assets does not establish that Trump directs individual trades, just as an asset rising after a government decision does not prove the decision was made to benefit its owner.
At the same time, the breadth of a president’s private financial interests is legitimately relevant when presidential decisions can materially affect industries, interest rates, cryptocurrencies and securities markets.
US conflict-of-interest rules also treat the president differently from many ordinary executive-branch officials under certain federal statutes. That makes transparency and robust disclosure particularly important.
The appropriate conclusion is therefore neither that financial interests prove corruption nor that they are irrelevant. The concentration of market-moving political authority and substantial private financial interests creates a governance issue that warrants scrutiny on its own merits.
The principle should not depend on whether the president is Donald Trump, a Democrat or anyone else.
What this means for mining investors
For Bullish Cartel, the significance of the Swing-Trading Presidency ultimately extends beyond political analysis.
A rising commodity price is not necessarily equivalent to improving economics for the companies producing it.
Consider gold.
A geopolitical escalation may push bullion higher as investors seek safety. If the same event sends crude oil dramatically higher, however, miners can simultaneously experience increased energy, transport and consumables costs. The improvement visible in the gold chart may therefore overstate the improvement occurring at the operating level.
The opposite scenario can be equally important. Gold may remain elevated after geopolitical tension subsides while crude falls sharply as an energy risk premium is removed. Revenue can remain strong while an important source of cost pressure declines.
That relationship is more economically meaningful to a mining company than the gold price viewed in isolation.
It is also why Bullish Cartel separates the macro operating environment from mining-margin analysis.
The Operating Environment Index™ (OEI™) examines the broader environment surrounding resource investment using a basket of market and macroeconomic relationships rather than relying on a single price. Gold, silver, oil, the US dollar and interest rates matter, as do relationships such as Gold/Oil and Silver/Oil.
The principle is similar to a currency index: no single component tells the entire story. The value comes from observing how the variables interact.
[Explore the OEI™ — Operating Environment Index →]
The Mining Margin Monitor™ (MEM™) then asks a more specific question: whether the underlying economic environment for mining margins is EXPANDING, STABLE or CONTRACTING.
MEM does not treat a proxy for mining costs as reported company AISC, nor does it assume historical cash-cost measures are directly comparable with modern AISC reporting. Its purpose is narrower: to monitor the relationship between commodity revenue and representative cost pressure and determine whether that relationship appears to be improving or deteriorating.
[Explore the MEM™ — Mining Margin Monitor →]
Together, those frameworks provide a useful way of analysing political shocks without allowing the headline itself to become the investment thesis.
The information disadvantage facing retail traders
There is an uncomfortable paradox in this market.
Political volatility can create extraordinary trading opportunities while simultaneously making short-term trading more dangerous.
A trader can correctly anticipate the economic damage from tariffs and still suffer a large loss if an unexpected pause produces a historic one-day rally. An investor can correctly identify escalating risk around Iran and still be caught by a ceasefire announcement that removes the oil premium overnight. A copper trader can correctly understand the administration’s tariff objectives but lose heavily because the final legal implementation differs from the market’s initial interpretation.
Leverage magnifies every one of those risks.
Retail investors also face an information-speed disadvantage. Professional institutions can receive machine-readable news feeds, automated headline analysis, cross-asset pricing information and sophisticated execution tools within fractions of a second.
By the time a retail investor sees a presidential post, interprets it and places a trade, algorithms may already have repriced the most liquid markets.
That does not mean retail investors cannot analyse markets effectively. It means they need to understand the difference between research and execution.
Long-term investing, swing trading, day trading and scalping are different disciplines. A long-term investor may build a thesis over years. A swing trader is attempting to capture movements lasting days or weeks. A day trader generally closes exposure within the session. A scalper may operate over minutes or seconds.
The shorter the timeframe, the greater the importance of execution speed, liquidity, position sizing and immediate information.
Trying to manage a multi-year investment according to every Trump headline can produce chronic overtrading. Trying to swing trade while applying a long-term investor’s tolerance for drawdowns can produce severe losses. Attempting to scalp geopolitical headlines against professional execution systems is a different activity again.
The Swing-Trading Presidency has made those distinctions more important.
The market is trading a president
The defining feature of the current environment is therefore not simply that Donald Trump moves markets. Presidents have always moved markets.
It is that investors increasingly attempt to model the sequence of his decisions.
The opening threat matters. So does the probability of negotiation. The tolerance for market stress matters. Treasury yields matter. Oil and gasoline prices matter. Inflation matters. The political consequences of all of them matter.
The market is effectively trying to estimate the President’s reaction function in real time.
That creates opportunities, but it also creates an obvious analytical trap: prediction can become more attractive than measurement.
For investors, a more disciplined approach is to ask what the market is currently pricing, which assets are most exposed if policy escalates, what changes if the policy is moderated, where leverage is concentrated and how the resulting movement affects the underlying economics of the businesses being analysed.
Those questions remain useful whether the next Truth Social post arrives in five minutes, five days or five months.
Trump’s second presidency has demonstrated that tariffs can erase enormous amounts of equity value and reversals can restore it with extraordinary speed. Iran and the Strait of Hormuz have shown that presidential diplomacy can transmit directly into physical energy markets. Copper and gold have demonstrated how rapidly commodity markets can move when traders misunderstand the eventual form of policy. Pressure on the Federal Reserve adds monetary policy and bond yields to the same network.
None of this requires assuming that the volatility is deliberately engineered.
It requires recognising that the volatility exists.
The modern investor is therefore dealing with something more complicated than conventional political risk. Presidential communication has become part of the market’s information infrastructure, and the gap between an announcement and its reversal can redistribute enormous amounts of wealth.
That is the real meaning of the Swing-Trading Presidency.
For traders, it creates opportunity accompanied by exceptional timing risk. For regulators, it raises legitimate questions about information controls and market integrity. For long-term investors, it reinforces the importance of distinguishing temporary price shocks from genuine changes in underlying economics.
The objective is not to predict every headline.
It is to understand what the headline actually changed.
Research. Monitor. Measure. Compare. Learn.
Research & Methodology Note
Bullish Cartel™ distinguishes documented events from allegations, political claims and analytical interpretation. References to insider trading, market manipulation and conflicts of interest in this article concern questions raised publicly about market integrity and governance. They do not constitute a finding that Donald Trump, members of his administration or any other person committed a securities offence.
OEI™ and MEM™ are Bullish Cartel research frameworks. MEM proxy or nowcast measures should not be interpreted as reported company AISC or other company-reported accounting measures.
Bullish Cartel™ provides independent research, market analysis and education. This material is general information only and does not constitute personal financial advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.
Financial markets have always traded politics. Elections move currencies, wars reprice commodities, tax policy changes earnings forecasts and central-bank appointments shift bond yields. What has distinguished Donald Trump’s second presidency is not simply the scale of the policy changes, but the speed with which they can be announced, threatened, negotiated, delayed or reversed — and the enormous amounts of capital that can move in between.
The result is a market environment Bullish Cartel describes as the “Swing-Trading Presidency”: a period in which presidential communication itself has become a significant source of tradable volatility.
The term is deliberately descriptive rather than accusatory. There is no basis in the evidence examined for this article to conclude that Trump is personally trading around policy announcements, or that he has committed insider trading or securities manipulation. There is, however, ample evidence that his statements and policy decisions have repeatedly produced exceptional movements across equities, bonds, currencies and commodities. The circumstances surrounding some of those episodes have also prompted lawmakers to raise legitimate questions about information controls, conflicts of interest and whether people with advance knowledge of government decisions could potentially profit from them.
Those are different propositions, and credible market analysis requires keeping them separate.
What is already observable is significant enough: investors increasingly have to analyse not only American policy, but Trump’s negotiating behaviour itself. A tariff threat may be an intended policy, an opening bargaining position or both. A geopolitical escalation can place a substantial risk premium into oil, while a subsequent indication of negotiations can remove it. A presidential social-media post can alter expectations before analysts have finished reading the underlying policy documents.
For investors, information about what the US government might do next has become an asset in its own right.
The April shock
The defining episode came during the tariff crisis of April 2025.
Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement introduced sweeping reciprocal tariffs and forced investors to reconsider assumptions about global trade, inflation, corporate margins and economic growth. The initial equity sell-off rapidly developed into something more serious as recession concerns intensified and instability spread into parts of the Treasury market.
That transmission mattered. Falling equities are painful, but disorder in US government bonds has consequences far beyond Wall Street. Treasury yields underpin borrowing costs throughout the American economy and provide reference rates for assets around the world. Once investors began selling Treasuries alongside risk assets, the tariff confrontation was no longer simply an equity-market event.
Trump later acknowledged the pressure in the bond market, saying investors had become “a little yippy” and describing the market as “tricky.” The episode suggested that while the administration might tolerate considerable equity volatility in pursuit of its negotiating objectives, instability in Treasuries represented a more consequential constraint.
Then came April 9.
At 9:37 a.m. in New York, Trump posted on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”
Several hours later, he announced a 90-day pause on the higher reciprocal tariffs for most countries while retaining a 10% baseline tariff and intensifying the confrontation with China.
The reaction was extraordinary. The S&P 500 surged 9.5%, its strongest session since the global financial crisis, while the Nasdaq Composite gained more than 12%. Roughly a week of escalating fear was partially unwound in a single session.
Nothing comparable had happened to the underlying productive capacity of the US economy during those few hours. What changed was the information available to investors.
That distinction sits at the centre of the Swing-Trading Presidency. Government policy had created the initial shock; a government decision then produced the reversal. Investors positioned between those two events experienced radically different outcomes depending largely on when they received and acted upon information.
The market-integrity question
The sequence inevitably attracted scrutiny.
Democratic lawmakers subsequently called for investigations into whether administration officials, associates or other individuals could have traded with advance knowledge of the tariff pause. The proximity between Trump’s public encouragement to buy and the subsequent announcement made the episode politically explosive.
It is important not to extend that evidence beyond what it establishes.
Trump’s post is public record. The tariff reversal and subsequent market rally are public record. Lawmakers’ requests for investigations are also public record. None of those facts, individually or collectively, establishes that Trump or another identifiable person engaged in insider trading.
Proving such conduct would require considerably more: evidence showing who possessed material non-public information, when they possessed it, whether securities were traded on the basis of that information, and whether the relevant legal requirements were satisfied.
The more important institutional question is broader.
Advance knowledge of a major presidential policy reversal can potentially be worth enormous amounts of money. When a single announcement is capable of moving trillions of dollars of market capitalisation, controls governing access to that information become critically important regardless of which political party occupies the White House.
The April episode therefore matters even without evidence of an underlying offence. It demonstrated the extraordinary economic value attached to the timing of presidential information.
Markets learned to trade the negotiation
April was not an isolated example.
During the tariff turmoil, even an erroneous report suggesting the administration was considering a 90-day tariff pause was sufficient to generate a sharp intraday market reversal before the White House denied it. The episode showed how sensitive investors had become not simply to tariff policy, but to the possibility that Trump might retreat from an initially aggressive position.
Subsequent negotiations reinforced that behaviour.
A US-China tariff truce in May 2025 produced another substantial rally after Washington and Beijing agreed to sharply reduce tariff rates while negotiations continued. Trump separately threatened a 50% tariff against the European Union before delaying its implementation following discussions.
Wall Street eventually attached an irreverent acronym to the strategy: TACO — “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Trump objected publicly to the phrase, but the trade itself reflected a serious change in market psychology. Investors were beginning to distinguish between Trump’s opening negotiating position and the policy ultimately implemented.
That distinction has important consequences.
If investors believe an extreme threat will eventually be moderated, selling immediately on every escalation becomes less attractive. Traders instead begin attempting to anticipate the point of maximum pressure — and the potential reversal that follows.
In effect, the President’s negotiating behaviour becomes part of the market’s reaction function.
Investors have long studied the Federal Reserve this way. Markets analyse how policymakers are likely to respond to inflation, unemployment, financial stress and deteriorating credit conditions. Under Trump, a similar analytical framework has increasingly been applied to the presidency: How much market pain will the administration tolerate? What would force a policy adjustment? Does weakness in equities matter? Does disorder in Treasuries matter more? How sensitive is the White House to oil prices, gasoline prices or inflation expectations?
These are no longer purely political questions. They affect asset prices.
The danger, of course, is that successful patterns eventually become crowded.
If investors become convinced that Trump will always retreat from an aggressive opening position, the risk eventually shifts in the opposite direction. A threat that is unexpectedly implemented can produce a more violent repricing precisely because the market had learned to discount it.
There is no permanent free trade in financial markets, including the trade built around presidential reversals.
Iran moved the trade into oil
Tariffs transmitted political volatility primarily through equities, currencies and bonds. Iran moved the same phenomenon directly into energy.
The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz makes the transmission unusually powerful. US Energy Information Administration data show that approximately 20.9 million barrels a day of petroleum liquids moved through the strait during the first half of 2025, equivalent to roughly one-fifth of global petroleum-liquids consumption. Alternative pipeline capacity is insufficient to replace those volumes in the event of a serious and prolonged disruption.
A confrontation involving Iran therefore has implications far beyond the Middle East.
Oil affects transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and household energy costs. It feeds into inflation expectations, which affect bond yields and expectations for monetary policy. Those yields, in turn, influence equity valuations, currencies, housing and financing conditions.
For the resources sector, oil has an additional significance: it is an important direct and indirect mining cost.
The June 2025 confrontation between Israel and Iran demonstrated the mechanism. Israeli strikes caused crude prices to rise as traders priced the possibility of a wider regional conflict and potential disruption to Hormuz. The subsequent US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities forced markets to assess whether the confrontation was about to expand further.
Iran retaliated against the US Al Udeid air base in Qatar. Yet the nature of the response and subsequent diplomatic signals began changing expectations about escalation. When Trump announced a ceasefire, a substantial portion of the geopolitical premium embedded in crude was quickly removed.
The sequence bore similarities to the tariff episodes, but with a crucial difference: this time presidential diplomacy was influencing the price of the commodity sitting near the beginning of the global inflation chain.
By 2026, the issue had become structural rather than episodic.
Negotiations over reopening and normalising traffic through Hormuz have repeatedly shifted expectations for physical oil supply. In August, disagreement between Washington and Tehran again complicated the outlook, with Iran tying reopening conditions to US concessions and Trump making counter-demands, including compensation connected with casualties during the conflict.
Crude responded immediately. Oil prices rose sharply as expectations for a rapid resolution deteriorated, with Brent trading around US$88 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate around US$82 on August 11. Shipping data reported at the time also indicated that traffic through Hormuz remained materially below recent averages.
This was not simply geopolitical sentiment expressed through futures markets. Physical shipping, tanker availability, insurance, freight costs and supply chains were involved.
Presidential diplomacy had become a variable in the physical commodity market.
From tariffs to copper and gold
The same information structure has appeared elsewhere in commodities.
Copper provided one of the clearest examples. When the Trump administration signalled a 50% tariff on copper imports in 2025, the prospect of trade restrictions created a significant distortion between US copper prices and international benchmarks as traders attempted to determine which products would ultimately fall within the tariff regime.
The final implementation differed materially from what parts of the market had anticipated. Refined copper was excluded, triggering a violent reversal in US copper futures.
The long-term fundamentals of copper had not suddenly disappeared. What changed was the regulatory assumption embedded in the price.
Gold experienced a related episode when uncertainty emerged over whether imported gold bars could become subject to US tariffs. The prospect was sufficiently disruptive to create confusion across physical and futures markets before Trump stated that gold would not be tariffed.
These episodes illustrate why policy risk has become particularly important for commodity investors.
A strong structural thesis can coexist with severe short-term volatility when government action alters trade flows, tariffs or market access. Investors analysing copper demand from electrification or gold demand from central banks can still be caught on the wrong side of a policy event that temporarily overwhelms those longer-term fundamentals.
The Federal Reserve adds another dimension
The administration’s confrontation with the Federal Reserve extends the same phenomenon into monetary policy.
Trump has repeatedly criticised the central bank and argued for lower interest rates. The significance extends beyond the political debate over Federal Reserve independence.
Tariffs can increase price pressure. Geopolitical disruption can increase energy costs. Higher energy prices can influence inflation expectations. Inflation influences the Federal Reserve’s policy choices, while expectations for those choices influence the dollar, Treasury yields, equities and precious metals.
These variables cannot be analysed independently.
A tariff announcement that is positive for a protected domestic industry may simultaneously increase inflation expectations. A confrontation with Iran may initially support gold through safe-haven demand while also increasing oil prices and therefore mining costs. A ceasefire may reduce crude prices, ease inflation expectations and alter expectations for interest rates — all while gold remains historically elevated.
The headline is only the beginning of the analysis.
The conflict-of-interest issue
Trump’s private financial interests add another layer of scrutiny.
Financial disclosures during his second presidency have documented substantial income and holdings across businesses, real estate, cryptocurrency-related ventures and financial assets. Subsequent disclosures have also reported purchases of corporate and municipal bonds.
The White House has said investment decisions are handled independently by third-party financial institutions.
That distinction is material. Ownership of financial assets does not establish that Trump directs individual trades, just as an asset rising after a government decision does not prove the decision was made to benefit its owner.
At the same time, the breadth of a president’s private financial interests is legitimately relevant when presidential decisions can materially affect industries, interest rates, cryptocurrencies and securities markets.
US conflict-of-interest rules also treat the president differently from many ordinary executive-branch officials under certain federal statutes. That makes transparency and robust disclosure particularly important.
The appropriate conclusion is therefore neither that financial interests prove corruption nor that they are irrelevant. The concentration of market-moving political authority and substantial private financial interests creates a governance issue that warrants scrutiny on its own merits.
The principle should not depend on whether the president is Donald Trump, a Democrat or anyone else.
What this means for mining investors
For Bullish Cartel, the significance of the Swing-Trading Presidency ultimately extends beyond political analysis.
A rising commodity price is not necessarily equivalent to improving economics for the companies producing it.
Consider gold.
A geopolitical escalation may push bullion higher as investors seek safety. If the same event sends crude oil dramatically higher, however, miners can simultaneously experience increased energy, transport and consumables costs. The improvement visible in the gold chart may therefore overstate the improvement occurring at the operating level.
The opposite scenario can be equally important. Gold may remain elevated after geopolitical tension subsides while crude falls sharply as an energy risk premium is removed. Revenue can remain strong while an important source of cost pressure declines.
That relationship is more economically meaningful to a mining company than the gold price viewed in isolation.
It is also why Bullish Cartel separates the macro operating environment from mining-margin analysis.
The Operating Environment Index™ (OEI™) examines the broader environment surrounding resource investment using a basket of market and macroeconomic relationships rather than relying on a single price. Gold, silver, oil, the US dollar and interest rates matter, as do relationships such as Gold/Oil and Silver/Oil.
The principle is similar to a currency index: no single component tells the entire story. The value comes from observing how the variables interact.
[Explore the OEI™ — Operating Environment Index →]
The Mining Margin Monitor™ (MEM™) then asks a more specific question: whether the underlying economic environment for mining margins is EXPANDING, STABLE or CONTRACTING.
MEM does not treat a proxy for mining costs as reported company AISC, nor does it assume historical cash-cost measures are directly comparable with modern AISC reporting. Its purpose is narrower: to monitor the relationship between commodity revenue and representative cost pressure and determine whether that relationship appears to be improving or deteriorating.
[Explore the MEM™ — Mining Margin Monitor →]
Together, those frameworks provide a useful way of analysing political shocks without allowing the headline itself to become the investment thesis.
The information disadvantage facing retail traders
There is an uncomfortable paradox in this market.
Political volatility can create extraordinary trading opportunities while simultaneously making short-term trading more dangerous.
A trader can correctly anticipate the economic damage from tariffs and still suffer a large loss if an unexpected pause produces a historic one-day rally. An investor can correctly identify escalating risk around Iran and still be caught by a ceasefire announcement that removes the oil premium overnight. A copper trader can correctly understand the administration’s tariff objectives but lose heavily because the final legal implementation differs from the market’s initial interpretation.
Leverage magnifies every one of those risks.
Retail investors also face an information-speed disadvantage. Professional institutions can receive machine-readable news feeds, automated headline analysis, cross-asset pricing information and sophisticated execution tools within fractions of a second.
By the time a retail investor sees a presidential post, interprets it and places a trade, algorithms may already have repriced the most liquid markets.
That does not mean retail investors cannot analyse markets effectively. It means they need to understand the difference between research and execution.
Long-term investing, swing trading, day trading and scalping are different disciplines. A long-term investor may build a thesis over years. A swing trader is attempting to capture movements lasting days or weeks. A day trader generally closes exposure within the session. A scalper may operate over minutes or seconds.
The shorter the timeframe, the greater the importance of execution speed, liquidity, position sizing and immediate information.
Trying to manage a multi-year investment according to every Trump headline can produce chronic overtrading. Trying to swing trade while applying a long-term investor’s tolerance for drawdowns can produce severe losses. Attempting to scalp geopolitical headlines against professional execution systems is a different activity again.
The Swing-Trading Presidency has made those distinctions more important.
The market is trading a president
The defining feature of the current environment is therefore not simply that Donald Trump moves markets. Presidents have always moved markets.
It is that investors increasingly attempt to model the sequence of his decisions.
The opening threat matters. So does the probability of negotiation. The tolerance for market stress matters. Treasury yields matter. Oil and gasoline prices matter. Inflation matters. The political consequences of all of them matter.
The market is effectively trying to estimate the President’s reaction function in real time.
That creates opportunities, but it also creates an obvious analytical trap: prediction can become more attractive than measurement.
For investors, a more disciplined approach is to ask what the market is currently pricing, which assets are most exposed if policy escalates, what changes if the policy is moderated, where leverage is concentrated and how the resulting movement affects the underlying economics of the businesses being analysed.
Those questions remain useful whether the next Truth Social post arrives in five minutes, five days or five months.
Trump’s second presidency has demonstrated that tariffs can erase enormous amounts of equity value and reversals can restore it with extraordinary speed. Iran and the Strait of Hormuz have shown that presidential diplomacy can transmit directly into physical energy markets. Copper and gold have demonstrated how rapidly commodity markets can move when traders misunderstand the eventual form of policy. Pressure on the Federal Reserve adds monetary policy and bond yields to the same network.
None of this requires assuming that the volatility is deliberately engineered.
It requires recognising that the volatility exists.
The modern investor is therefore dealing with something more complicated than conventional political risk. Presidential communication has become part of the market’s information infrastructure, and the gap between an announcement and its reversal can redistribute enormous amounts of wealth.
That is the real meaning of the Swing-Trading Presidency.
For traders, it creates opportunity accompanied by exceptional timing risk. For regulators, it raises legitimate questions about information controls and market integrity. For long-term investors, it reinforces the importance of distinguishing temporary price shocks from genuine changes in underlying economics.
The objective is not to predict every headline.
It is to understand what the headline actually changed.
Research. Monitor. Measure. Compare. Learn.
Research & Methodology Note
Bullish Cartel™ distinguishes documented events from allegations, political claims and analytical interpretation. References to insider trading, market manipulation and conflicts of interest in this article concern questions raised publicly about market integrity and governance. They do not constitute a finding that Donald Trump, members of his administration or any other person committed a securities offence.
OEI™ and MEM™ are Bullish Cartel research frameworks. MEM proxy or nowcast measures should not be interpreted as reported company AISC or other company-reported accounting measures.
Bullish Cartel™ provides independent research, market analysis and education. This material is general information only and does not constitute personal financial advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.