Investors use a litany of methods to figure out what might be the next big thing to take off. They use market movement, news articles and even the president’s own social media posts.
President Donald Trump’s media group, Trump Media & Technology Group, is trying to take advantage of that by allowing investors early access to his posts before anyone else for a charge, as Straight Arrow previously reported.
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But a recent analysis by JPMorgan shows that the market may be moving away from using the president’s posts as a source of important investment information.
Do the president’s posts carry any weight?
According to Axios, researchers at JPMorgan found that the majority of Trump’s Truth Social posts have little effect on the market. To test this, JPMorgan’s rate analysts looked at how U.S. Treasury yields moved in the 30 minutes after Trump posted about the Middle East. They then compared them to everyday volatility in the bond market.
They found two things. First, they found that most of Trump’s posts about the Middle East didn’t result in larger rate movement than what would be expected on any given day for no reason at all. This means if a person didn’t know the president had just made a post, they likely couldn’t tell from the yield chart.
But they also found that a few posts did elicit a real spike. A small number of posts did line up with 30-minute yield swings that were unusually large. What they suggested, according to Axios, was that the market learned to mostly disregard Trump’s posts on the Middle East except for the occasional post that actually contained new, relevant information.
As the conflict continued, the analysts also found that the market’s reaction to Trump’s posts changed depending on their content. Posts that suggested escalation had a fading effect over time, while posts suggesting de-escalation continued to move yields, according to the Financial Times.
To dig deeper, JPMorgan analysts split the Iran war timeline into three periods and looked at how the 2-year Treasury yield moved in the 30 minutes after each Trump post regarding the conflict. They also sorted the yield reactions into two buckets. The first was significant increases, or if the yield jumped more than one basis point. The second was significant decreases, or if the yield dropped more than one basis point. A basis point is just 1/100th of a percentage point, which is small in the grand scheme of things, but for the 2-year yield in a 30-minute window, a one-basis-point change is a meaningful move.
What they found was that in the first month of the conflict, a large share of Trump’s posts were followed by a significant yield increase. In later periods, that share dropped noticeably.
What this likely implies is that early in the war, bond traders often read Trump’s posts as escalatory, which pushed yields higher. But as the war continued, traders seemed to have stopped treating each new post as fresh escalation news since the war was ongoing. But what was interesting was that when Trump posted updates that were de-escalatory, which pushed yields down, analysts found that it had roughly the same effect. This was because actual news of the conflict calming down remained genuinely informative regardless of how long the conflict had run.
Can Trump move the markets?
The JPMorgan research specifically studied how Trump’s posts regarding the Middle East moved the bond-yield market, but as the most important politician in the world, his words still carry weight in other ways.
On April 9, 2025, Trump sent a series of posts on his Truth Social account telling his followers what to do on the stock market. In his first post, Trump told his followers to “BE COOL” and that everything is going to work out. Then, less than five minutes later, he posted again, saying “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”
Hours after his posts, he announced a 90-day pause on nearly all of his reciprocal tariffs. At the end of the day, stocks finished sharply higher, meaning if people bought stocks when he said to, they likely made some money. This prompted some politicians to allege Trump was trying to manipulate the stock market, as Straight Arrow previously reported.
Another example of Trump’s social media posts affecting the stock market was related to clothing brand American Eagle. In August 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social, wading into the controversy over an ad featuring actor Sydney Sweeney. He posted that because of the ad, the jeans were “flying off the shelves.” Yahoo Finance reported at the time that American Eagle stock rose 20% after the post.
While JPMorgan’s analysis did find that most of Trump’s posts were not relevant to investors, Axios wrote that some still have the power to move the market.
Round out your reading
- Your phone isn’t really eavesdropping. But it still knows all about you.
- After years of denying other elections, MyPillow founder won’t accept his own defeat.
- Gun suppressors sold unregistered for the first time since FDR, but not for everyone.
- Why an over-scrolled generation is turning to ‘grandma hobbies’ for mental health.
- Our personal information is for sale on the internet. We know — we bought it.
