On the 1st of August, a new product went live that tells you something important about how markets work, and how they’re now being nudged to work differently.
It’s called Truth API. It’s run by Trump Media, and for a fee it gives banks and trading firms the fastest possible access to posts from the ten most influential accounts on Truth Social, the President’s among them, complete with an archive stretching back to 2022.
Your first, entirely reasonable question is: why would anyone pay for that?
The answer is that the President’s posts move markets, and not gently. When he posted in April 2025 that many of the new tariffs would be paused for ninety days, US shares climbed within minutes. A post is now, on occasion, a market event. And in a world where a few milliseconds can be worth a fortune to the right firm, being a fraction of a second ahead of everyone else on a market-moving message is a thing people will pay real money for.
Quite a lot of money, as it turns out. The reported pitch was up to $100,000 a month, or a mere $60,000 if you signed for three years.
Now, before I get complaints from the MAGA crowd, I will say that a securities lawyer quoted at the launch said that tiering access to information like this doesn’t appear to break the law. It does, he added, create uneven odds for smaller players. Both of those things can be true at once, and they are.
Here’s why a small subscription product most of us will never see is worth a moment of your attention.
For as long as we’ve been advising people, we’ve been believers in something called the efficient market hypothesis. In plain terms: in a large, mature market like the US, almost everything that’s known is known by everyone trading at roughly the same time, and it’s already in the price. It’s not a perfect description of reality, but it’s a very good one, and it unpins low-cost investing.
The whole thrust of the last few decades has been towards that world. Information has got wider, faster and cheaper for everyone, year after year. The playing field has been levelling.
Truth API is a small step in the other direction. It takes a piece of market-moving information and, instead of letting it reach everyone at once, sells a head start to whoever can pay. It re-tilts the field, very slightly, back towards those with the deepest pockets.
At Altor we don’t think this is a good development but equally it shouldn’t matter to those we look after.
If your financial plan depends on reacting to a Presidential post a half-second before a hedge fund’s algorithm does, you have already lost, and you lost long before Truth API existed. That game belongs to firms with co-located servers and rooms full of people whose entire job is to be first by a whisker. It is not, and never was, the game a long-term investor is playing.
The long-term investor’s edge isn’t speed. It’s the opposite of speed. It’s owning a broad slice of the world’s productive companies at the lowest cost you can manage, and then having the temperament to leave it alone while other people sprint around reacting to things. You are not trying to beat the algorithm to the President’s ‘Truths’. You are trying to still be invested, calmly, in twenty years, which is a challenge of behaviour, not milliseconds.
So Truth API is a genuinely interesting sign of the times, and mildly dispiriting if you care about a level field. But it changes nothing about how a sensible person should invest, because it’s selling an advantage in a contest you’d already, wisely, declined to enter.
Let the banks pay $100,000 a month to read the President a heartbeat early. You’ve got better things to do with both the money and the heartbeat.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent invest for the long term, which mostly means ignoring the things that are designed to be reacted to. It’s harder than it sounds and worth more than it looks.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and past performance is not a guide to the future.