Lisa Mainwaring 🎧

@gothburz It’s like reading the start of a Jack Reacher novel. Surveillance without enforcement doesn’t deter anything. It just records it…

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue. On April 21st, the left screen moved first. I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug. At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy. On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me. At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire. Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83. I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags. My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports. The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026: Reviewed. That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. Let me show you my flags. March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it. March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it. April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it. April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it. April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it. That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one. The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March. Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012. Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence. Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets. The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade. I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email. The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action. One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared. One account is a coincidence. But there were six. Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000. My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger. March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes. The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event. The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting." Then the White House sent the email again. I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread. I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated. But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed. Zero prosecutions. As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations. The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still. In my field, we call this price discovery.

Brilliant night @daraobriain Creation tour @Rosetheatre Laugh out loud. His adoption story was funny & poignant. He managed to make something deeply personal hilarious without losing any of its emotional weight. Really good to see @AdoptionUK there. A great gig & a great cause.

@elonmusknews30 Everyone still calls ex-twitter anyway.

@bentaylor75 @Gareth_Roberts_ @SW_Help Hi Gareth, well apparently we are now going fast to Tedders. It’ll have to go like the clappers because we’re already 12 mins late. I often wonder what it must feel like to live in a country where trains glide in on time and no one has to “locate” a driver.

@lisamainwaring @Gareth_Roberts_ @SW_Help It’s the worst line ever. Upper Haliford once an hour if lucky these days.

In a few minutes, they captured what so many families are living through: children who’ve endured unimaginable early trauma now being denied the specialist therapy they need to heal. And families giving up their careers to look after them. It’s a false economy. #adoptionpoverty

@MrMKimber That’s pretty shit. Sorry to hear that Martin. Is that something you just tick on settings? Luddite here!

Reminder to everyone in London: worth Face ID locking your apps. Just had a lovely individual try to snatch my phone out of my hand on a bicycle. Not doing wonders for my general faith in human decency.

Round 2 of “Diwali or Die Hard” here in SW London. Spielberg must be filming a Saving Private Ryan reboot. Chatting to a friend in Shropshire earlier who had no idea what I was talking about. Must be nice to live somewhere the night sky isn’t full of shockwaves & rogue rockets!

It currently sounds like we’ve been teleported into a budget remake of Saving Private Ryan. I’m all for a sparkler or two, but surely fireworks should come with a noise-curfew and a permission slip from every local dog and toddler.

Adoption poverty is a political choice. Families raising children with complex PTSD from early abuse & neglect are being left to cope alone. Cut post-adoption support & you don’t save money, you just shift the cost to classrooms, crisis wards & prisons. #PennyWisePoundFoolish

@piersmorgan I honestly thought it said “God bless the pacemaker” and honestly, I didn’t even question it.

Woke Left: ‘He’s the new Hitler.’

And the Universal Credit bill has passed. Some of the sickest people in the country will suffer needlessly more now. There is no justification, no excuse. Just ugly, cruel choices by ministers too cowardly to tax the wealthy rather than cut the poor. A shameful day for Labour.

Did someone leave a curler in your hair @Peston or bed-hair?

You can see the full toolkit from @turn2us_org here: turn2us.org.uk/about-us/news-…

Thanks so much for sharing, @DrFrancesRyan. It's vital we challenge harmful narratives & ensure everyone reporting on welfare reform/social security gets it right, especially with the PIP vote around the corner. Appreciate your support! #SocialSecurity #EndStigma #PIP

My husband roped me into watching @ClarksonsFarm1 & now I’m hooked like a sheep on a quad bike. Just watched the episode where the bull arrives-actual tears of laughter. It’s rural chaos at its finest. Watch it. Your abs will hate you.

@Toryscott Whoop whoop! Congratulations Tory!

I think it's important to celebrate the wins in your writing career, so if you'll allow me a not very humble brag... The Storyteller's Daughter is in the 100s in the UK Kindle chart, and 300s in the USA. This is the first novel I've had take off the USA. Happy dance.

Also the government seems to be completely blind to Adoption Poverty

Listening to the Urgent Question asked by @munirawilson in Parliament just now re Adoption Support Fund. The funding equates to approximately £2.5k per child. If each child (c.20,000) got the full amount the funding would need to be £150m - not £50 million...

Finally, a journalist highlights the scandal nobody’s talking about. Up to 18,000 adopted children are losing life-changing therapy. The government encouraged adoption, but now families face abandonment. The long-term consequences will affect generations. shorturl.at/EgHl6

@GBNEWS Gee what terrible journalism. He’s not permanently leaving (as you well know). Click bait crap!

Buckingham Palace provides new update on King Charles and his plans to leave the UK gbnews.com/royal/buckingh…