Just minutes before Donald Trump announced a temporary pause on strikes targeting Iran's energy sites, billions of dollars starting flowing through the oil market.

Contracts for at least six million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude were sold at around 6.50am on Monday - roughly ten times the daily average.

At 7.05am, President Trump dropped a bombshell on global markets as he said the US wanted to negotiate with Iran.

Oil prices dropped sharply, around 14 percent in a matter of minutes, and money flowed into the pockets of the early traders.

It's not the first time that outsize bets have rippled across the markets since Trump took office: everything from Bitcoin to stock?index futures options have made traders buckets of cash, with prediction sites making profiteering even more accessible. 

But the prospect that insider traders are potentially making money on highly classified secrets from the heart of the Oval Office during the Iran war poses a far more glaring security and ethical question.

Matt Saincome, CEO of Unusual Whales, a platform to detect anomalous trading activity, told the Daily Mail that the data leaves little room for doubt that regulators should investigate the trades. 

'I can say the data here demands an investigation,' Saincome stated. 'Regulators should explain to the public what happened here.' 

'I would love to be in the room when this trader explains what happened here. If the trader is never asked to explain, I would love to be in the room when the regulators are asked why the hell not.'

The suspicious timing does not necessarily mean the trades were illegal, Saincome noted. 

No Trump administration official has been implicated in any wrongdoing. 

'All federal employees are subject to government ethics guidelines that prohibit the use of nonpublic information for financial benefit,' White House Spokesman Kush Desai told the Daily Mail in a statement.

'However, any implication that administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.'

Executive branch ethics regulations prohibit government employees from conduct or participating in gambling activity while on government owned or leased property, or while on duty for the government, according to a White House official.

Still, the massive scale of the trades make the concerns hard to dismiss. 

Contracts for at least 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate oil were sold within minutes, according to exchange data compiled by Bloomberg - roughly ten times the daily average of around 700,000 barrels in the five days leading up to the Monday trades.