Paid early access to market-moving news has a dated record. From 2007 to June 2013, a small group of fee-paying, high-speed traders received the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment from Thomson Reuters at 9:54:58 a.m., two seconds before its broader release at 9:55:00 [8]. On 1 August 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group launched Truth API, a subscription feed with licensed, low-latency access to publicly available posts from certain top Truth Social accounts [31]. Between those dates, several such arrangements ended or changed [6, 10, 14, 16, 18].
This article gives each party's position as its own documents state it and reaches no view on whether any arrangement is lawful.
Who receives market-moving news first
The answer depends on who publishes. A company that reports to the SEC and shares material nonpublic information with market professionals or certain holders must, under Regulation FD, make it public "simultaneously" when the disclosure is intentional, through a Form 8-K or another method "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public" [1]. The SEC's 2008 website guidance adds that public investors "must be afforded a reasonable waiting period to react to the information" [3]. In the European Union, inside information is to be disseminated "free of charge" and "simultaneously throughout the Union" [5].
Other publishers sit outside those rules. Hu, Pan and Wang observed that "there are very few regulatory rules on how private agencies release their own data" [8]. Federal statistical agencies follow an OMB directive that "all users have equitable and timely access" to their data [16]. Exchanges answer to Rule 603(a) of Regulation NMS on what they send to the consolidated feeds [14].
The Michigan survey's two-second tier
Thomson Reuters' 2007 deal for exclusive rights to distribute the Michigan index carried "a price tag in excess of $1 million" [8]. Fee-paying clients received the numbers at 9:54:58, Thomson Reuters terminals and a conference call carried them at 9:55:00, and the university posted them at 10:00:00 [8]. Citing the New York Times, Hu, Pan and Wang report about a dozen clients, each paying over $6,000 a month [8].
On 8 July 2013 the New York Attorney General announced that Thomson Reuters had agreed to stop the early release, a move the office said its investigation prompted [6]. On 7 October 2014 the office announced that Bloomberg was taking over the survey's distribution and ending paid advance copies, and the Attorney General placed the change in his office's work against what he called "Insider Trading 2.0" [7].
Press-release wires and the 4:01 p.m. release
Early in 2014 Business Wire and Marketwired each agreed to stop providing similar market-moving data to high-frequency traders, and on 30 April PR Newswire agreed to have its direct-feed recipients certify each year that they would not use the feeds for high-frequency trading [10]. Because some exchanges let trading continue for milliseconds past 4:00 p.m., PR Newswire began advising clients to send after-close releases at 4:01 p.m. [10]. The listing exchanges' own rules for news after the close are set out in company disclosure timing and the 23-hour trading day.
The gap between a wire's receipt of a release and its publication has value too. On 11 August 2015 the SEC charged 32 defendants in an alleged scheme to trade on earnings releases hacked from newswires, with more than $100 million in alleged illegal profits [11]. In one alleged instance, traders began selling a company's stock short 10 minutes after the company sent its release to a newswire, inside a 36-minute gap before publication [11].
Exchange feeds and the consolidated feeds
On 14 September 2012 the SEC announced that NYSE had agreed to a $5 million penalty, which it described as its first financial penalty against an exchange [14]. The SEC found that from 2008 NYSE sent data through two proprietary feeds before the consolidated feeds that distribute trade and quote data to the public, with gaps "from single-digit milliseconds to multiple seconds" [14]. NYSE settled without admitting or denying the findings [14]. The consolidated tape's own timestamp fields are covered in TAQ data explained.
SEC filings and government lockups
The SEC's paid feed of EDGAR filings carried a head start. Rogers, Skinner and Zechman found that most Form 4 filings in their sample reached paying subscribers before the EDGAR website, with prices, volumes and spreads responding about 30 seconds before posting, and reported that the SEC agreed to eliminate the advantage [12].
Government lockups are secured rooms where news organizations read data under embargo [18]. At the Labor Department, participants typically had 30 minutes before the official release [16]. In January 2014 the department's Inspector General found that news organizations could pre-load the data, so their clients could trade on it faster than the department could post it, and cited a Wall Street Journal report that some clients paid $375,000 a year for such feeds [15]. The department's lockup ended on 3 June 2020, with data released to the general public "all at once, through online publication" at 8:30 a.m. Eastern [16].
CNBC reported in October 2013 that the Federal Reserve had revamped security procedures for releasing market-moving information weeks after unusual trading around its 18 September decision, and that Fed officials declined to say whether the two were connected [17]. On 21 August 2015, two days after a news organization broke an embargo on Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, the Board stopped using its remote embargo application for FOMC-related information and the other market-moving publications its Inspector General's audit covered, moving them to its lockup room [18].
What studies measured inside the head start
Hu, Pan and Wang found that in E-mini S&P 500 futures, volume at 9:54:58 averaged 2,855 contracts per second, against 87 on days without the release, and the first 200 milliseconds held 89% of that second's return on negative news days [8]. They found the tier brought faster price discovery and lower volatility, and concluded that tiered release "may help to reduce, rather than enhance, the informational advantage of faster traders" [8]. Wu, Liu, Suardi and Chang studied the same two seconds in Nasdaq stocks and found that liquidity demanders earned substantive profits, consistent with the notion that fast traders' informational advantages may increase adverse selection costs for others [9].
Bernile, Hu and Tang found evidence consistent with informed trading during FOMC embargoes and none during lockups ahead of payrolls, producer prices and GDP [19]. Kurov, Sancetta, Strasser and Wolfe found evidence of substantial informed trading before nine of 20 market-moving U.S. macroeconomic announcements, with prices moving about 30 minutes early [20]. Budish, Cramton and Shim argued that under continuous trading "even symmetrically observed public information creates arbitrage rents" [22]. The event-study methods note covers windows that open early enough to catch such drift.
Truth API and the simultaneity question
The company announced Truth API on 16 July 2026 as a licensed, real-time feed for organizations affected by "the cost of a delay in information", including high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms, with delivery "in milliseconds" [23]. Its release named no price, and the Associated Press (AP) reported a $100,000 monthly fee [23, 28]. In a Financial Times interview the company furnished to the SEC on 6 August, its interim chief executive was reported saying about 10 groups, mostly high-frequency traders, had signed at $60,000 to $100,000 a month [29].
The interim chief executive told the Financial Times that "when the user presses post, it's public information" [29]. In a CNBC interview the company furnished, he said: "We give a 50-millisecond advantage in that post, but that's the internet delivery. All posts go out in real time" [30]. AP reported Truth Social's position that the information is released to traders and the general public at the same time [28]. A critic of high-speed trading quoted by AP said what matters is when the posts are received, and that a buyer with a system built to process them could act faster than other readers [28].
On 20 July a U.S. representative asked the SEC to evaluate whether the service implicates federal securities laws [25], and on 28 July two U.S. senators asked it to open an investigation [26]. CNBC reported that the SEC declined to comment [27]. On 3 August a U.S. senator introduced S. 5223, which as introduced makes it unlawful for a platform to knowingly sell earlier or faster access to posts by the President and other officials, and for anyone to trade while aware of information from such access before the post is generally available [32, 33].
The company's 10-Q, filed 9 November, states that on 21 September the San Francisco City Attorney sued it under California's Unfair Competition Law, seeking to halt the challenged operation of Truth API, which the company disputes, and that two other suits challenge the service without naming the company [37].
Which timestamp an event record keeps
Each case has at least two times: when some readers had the information and when a wider audience did. A Michigan record dated at the university's 10:00:00 posting would sit about five minutes after the price discovery Hu, Pan and Wang measured (derived) [8]. Trading clocks follow set rules: within 100 microseconds of UTC for high-frequency algorithmic trading in the EU [34], and time stamps at least to the millisecond for the U.S. consolidated audit trail [35].
Rillor's event studies state, for every event, when the statement first became public, where that time comes from and which clock recorded it.
Read the full report
The full report adds each case's dated record, the rule texts, the studies' figures and all 37 sources.