$100,000 a month, Trump starts selling "Alpha"

Trump has pulled off yet another unthinkable move that defies public expectations.

According to a report from the Financial Times, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) is exploring the monetization of real-time feeds on the Truth Social platform, planning to offer low-latency data services to institutional clients with a price tag as high as $100,000 per month. Institutions that purchase this service will be able to access Trump's latest posts faster than regular users, to track policy signals, market sentiment, and the potential impact of political events.

The Time Gap Is the Most Valuable Commodity in the Market

For investors focusing on the U.S. market, Truth Social is no ordinary social platform. After the Capitol Hill incident in 2021, Trump was banned from mainstream social platforms including Twitter (now X) and Facebook. Subsequently, TMTG launched Truth Social, which Trump adopted as his primary channel for public communication. Although Trump later regained access to his X account, most of his major policy announcements related to tariffs, trade, diplomacy, regulation, and other critical areas are still prioritized for release on Truth Social. This has gradually turned the platform into the primary information source for global investors tracking Trump's movements.

Even so, this still seems like a somewhat inconceivable business. After all, Truth Social is inherently a public platform, and every post Trump makes becomes visible to everyone within seconds. If the information is public, why would institutions be willing to pay such a high price for it?

The answer is not difficult to understand. In financial markets, the most expensive thing has never been the information itself, but the time gap that allows you to obtain information earlier than others.

For regular users, seeing a post a few seconds earlier hardly makes any difference. But for quantitative funds, high-frequency trading firms, and even some crypto trading teams, those few seconds are enough to determine whether a trade results in a profit or a loss. When the market has grown accustomed to repricing assets based on every move Trump makes, whoever accesses the information first gains the opportunity to act ahead of others.

In other words, what TMTG is truly selling is not a single post, but a form of "Presidential Alpha".

The Trump Terminal That Outperforms the Bloomberg Terminal

In reality, TMTG is not the first player to come up with this business model.

On Wall Street, selling real-time data is already an extremely mature business practice. Whether it is Bloomberg, Reuters, the New York Stock Exchange, or Nasdaq, all of them have long provided paid data services to institutional clients. From listed companies' financial reports and macroeconomic data to tick-by-tick stock transactions and order book changes, these institutions can almost obtain such information in advance through dedicated lines or data interfaces with lower latency and higher stability.

It is worth noting that most of what they sell is not "exclusive news" — the vast majority of information will eventually be disclosed to the entire market. What is truly valuable is that institutions can receive this information a few milliseconds, hundreds of milliseconds, or even a few seconds earlier than others. This time advantage often translates into trading opportunities, and can even directly determine the profitability of a strategy.

TMTG is doing the same thing, and even taking it a step further — Unlike traditional financial terminals such as the Bloomberg Terminal, which are merely information collectors and distributors, Trump himself is the source of the information. No matter how fast the Bloomberg Terminal is, it essentially aggregates and transmits market information; what TMTG sells is the exclusive priority access to every dynamic Trump posts on Truth Social.

In other words, No matter how powerful the Bloomberg Terminal is, it is at most a reseller of second-hand information. But the "Trump Terminal" run by the former president delivers absolute first-hand intelligence.

Only Trump Can Make This Money

Theoretically, every U.S. president, as well as leaders of other major countries, possesses a similar ability to influence the market.

From important official appointments and dismissals to fiscal policies, from diplomatic games to military conflicts, every word and action of a leader can sway the pricing of global capital markets. But Trump is probably the only one who has packaged this influence into a formal business and openly sold it to Wall Street.

The critical prerequisite here is that Trump's first-hand information is indeed sufficiently valuable.

Over the past few years, Trump's Truth Social has become a vital information source for global investors. From tariff policies to trade negotiations, from cryptocurrency regulation to the selection of the Federal Reserve Chair, multiple posts from Trump have triggered drastic fluctuations in the U.S. stock market, the U.S. dollar, gold, and the crypto market. A series of trading strategies formed around expectations of Trump's policies, such as the Trump Trade and TACO Trade, further demonstrate that the market has long regarded his remarks as a tradable "market factor".

But the more important reason may lie in Trump himself. While most previous U.S. presidents viewed their political influence as a public resource, Trump is more accustomed to treating influence as an asset that can be operated on, amplified, and monetized.

Looking back over the past few years, from NFTs and meme coins to Truth Social, Truth.Fi, and Trump Mobile, and now selling real-time data services on Truth Social to institutions, the product forms have been constantly changing, but the underlying logic has never shifted — continuously transforming the "Trump" IP into sellable, subscribable, and investable commercial products.

For many traditional politicians, the presidency represents power, and also requires them to maintain a distance from commercial interests. But in Trump's view, there seems to be no inherent boundary between the two. As long as the market is willing to pay for influence, influence itself can become a commodity.

In other words, It is not that Trump created the demand, but that he realized earlier than anyone else that "presidential influence" itself is also an asset that can be priced and sold.

This article is sourced from the WeChat Official Account "Odaily" (ID: o-daily), authored by Azuma, edited by Hao Fangzhou, and published by 36Kr with authorization.