These sort of trades happy fairly regularly, before market breaking news in individual stock names.
Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)
The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.
I think the post established that this volume or size of spike is unique before any market-shifting news event coming out of the government in recent decades. The "sort" of transaction is irrelevant except that it's risky and thus relatively low volume normally.
I said it happens in individual stock cases, but very few people / places that control major market moving news leak - and when they do they investigate the hell out of it.
Imagine if this happened 20 minutes before Jerome Powell unexpectedly dropped interest rates?
Just search for SEC insider trading cases. When they happen in options they are often pretty obvious unless the market is moving with real momentum the same way, and even then, option sellers will report you if they think it is suspicious. (By obvious, I mean, regulators should start asking questions - of course there can be a multitude of reasons.)
The difference here is that absolutely NO ONE on any side of politics seems to think the SEC & DOJ will pursue these.