Unusual Options Trading Before Trump's Tariff Announcement Pause
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Hey all,
Nicholas from the Unusual Whales team, here! We’re going to spend one issue every week walking you through some trades of the week for free to help your trading!
In this issue, we’re going to cover some suspiciously timed options trades on the S&P 500 $SPY and the Invesco QQQ Trust $QQQ. The trades were so unusual due to the timing surrounding two separate posts by President Donald Trump that caused significant market volatility, and an even more significant, historical even, reversal in equities.
On the morning of April 9th, 2025, President Trump posted on Truth Social, now is a great time to buy, while also mentioning his company $DJT.
Hours later, he announced the 90 day pause to reciprocal tariffs and lowered universal tariffs to 10%.
Mind you, this announcement ALSO happened the day prior (sort of), and was called “Fake News” and written off as nothing by the White House.
This new confirmation of a pause on April 9th caused a massive spike in the S&P 500 that saw the $QQQ rise over 10% in what felt like mere moments. Hours before the spike, numerous unusual options activity hit the tape on both $SPY and $QQQ.
As I mentioned, there was a flurry of 0DTE action on $SPY across numerous strikes.
All contracts we discuss from this flurry were mentioned in REAL TIME by users in the Unusual Whales Discord server. You can also see via the Unusual Whales Discord Bot that one of the main contracts we discuss on $SPY was actually the MOST bookmarked contract of the day on April 9th. So these trades definitely sparked some interest and sent waves within the community.
We'll start with the lower strikes and work our way up. So first up, we have the SPY $499 strike calls, 0DTE (April 9th expiry) again. Roughly 2 minutes after the first post by Donald Trump, these $499 0DTE calls got smacked with roughly 8,000 volume at an average fill of $7.54 per contract.
A mix of bid and side activity on this one, so it’s not the cleanest flow in the world, here. But in retrospect, it looks a little bit strange now, given the insane movement in the afternoon. And insane might be putting it lightly; from the entry of $7.54 per contract, the $499C traded as high as $46.58; that’s a 518% gain in mere hours.
The next contract we’ll be looking at is the $504 $SPY call contract, which also expired on April 9th; a 0DTE trade.
This one stands out a little, because there was repeat activity all throughout the morning following the initial post by Donald Trump. Then, as you can see in the image above, RIGHT before the announcement of a 90 day tariff pause, nearly 20,000 total volume transacted on the contract, with the two larger candles you see there representing a combined 10,000+ of that volume at roughly $5.72 per contract.
Lo and behold, the post by Trump hit the wire, and like magic, those $504C 0DTE calls ripped and blew off the top of profitability for this…. unusual trader. This contract hit a high of $41.02 following the tariff pause; a 617% gain representing $70,600,000 profit from point of entry at the contract’s highs.
Moving on to the $510 call. So this one was actually a bit unfortunate timing. We have 20,000 contracts of the $510 strike calls with Spy trading at about $500 at the time. So quite out of the money for when they hit the tape.
The reason we say the timing was unfortunate is because they indeed did buy these contracts RIGHT before the announcement…. But they also sold them before the price spiked. Some of the contracts closed for profit, some did not, on this $510C; but the timing and manner of the transactions still matches the exact same “unusualness” as the other trades we’ve revisited.
Before I get to the $QQQ trade and the final $SPY example, Unusual Whales has partnered with tastytrade to provide the best experience for you as a trader. Get the best platform for trading options and US equities, and get 25% off your first 4 months of Unusual Whales when you use our link.
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The next unusual trade to highlight happened in the same way, on the same timeframe, as the others; the $QQQ $460 call expiring on 4/17/2025. This one caught a lot of attention because of how absolutely massive it was. However, it seems more likely that this one was, while still weirdly timed and unusual, most likely a positional closure of a pre-existing short on the contract.
“Well if it’s a close, who cares?” We care, because the timing matches EXACTLY the same way as the $SPY trades we broke down. 2 minutes after Trump said “buy”, this massive ask-side order came in on the $460C contract. If this was indeed a closure of a short position, this trader saved themselves millions upon millions of dollars by closing the position mere hours before the 90-day pause announcement. Definitely fits the bill of “unusual”, even if it’s not quite as sexy as naked long calls would have been in this situation.
And finally, the last $SPY contract we’re going to highlight here was not a 0DTE contract, but it was indeed the most clean and clear cut example of the bunch.
A mere TWO minutes after Trump posted his “great time to buy” comment on Truth Social, someone grabbed 20,000 contracts of the $600C expiring on September 19th, 2025 for an average price of $3.50 per contract. Later that day, not too terribly long after the 90-day tariff pause announcement, the trader capitalized on the insane spike. They closed these contracts out for $7.70 each; a 120% gain representing over $10.5 million in profit. IN JUST FIVE HOURS! VERY unusual.
So to summarize, here:
$SPY $499C 0DTE: $7.54 → $$46.58 | +518%
$SPY $504C 0DTE: $5.72 → $41.02 | +617%
$SPY $600C 9/19/2025: $3.50 → $7.70 | +120%
$QQQ $460C 4/17/2025: Closed shorts before announcement, saving MILLIONS in potential losses.
You can also see the YouTube Video Breakdown of these trades by clicking here!
Thank you as always for reading! REMEMBER!! You can get 25% off your first four months of Unusual Whales when you open a new tastytrade account and link it to your UW account!
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NOTE: This post is not financial advice. The stock market is risky, and any trade or investment is expected to have some, or total, loss. Please do research before any trade. Do not use this information for investment decisions. Check terms on site for full terms. Agree to terms before considering this information.