I was reading this event, and unless I'm missing something, all of these reports and theories don't mention the blindingly obvious fact that should be dominating - 1pm was the 10 year bone auction.
Due to many factors (mostly around the crash that was in full swing, and a bond market that was illiquid and melting down), this was a key moment around which a huge amount of position management happened.
I'm not at all saying that there shouldn't be extensive investigation around insider trading around the Trump announcement. There obviously should be. And I'm also not saying that a big block of calls wouldn't fit the bill for that. It would (although it begs the question about the actor being so brazen. There would be countless ways to hide the bet more effectively while still producing insane profit).
What I am saying is that it's ridiculous to me that there's no discussion about the bond auction! First of all you can't just look at a block of option contracts independently many of them are part of wider trade structures. Those call options could have just been hedging short portfolio deltas, or be part of any number of strategies. The timing does signify that you ever executed the trade, ill intentioned or not, was aware of bond auction mechanics.
So you're starting to run into some Occam's razor territory here. Either the participant was sophisticated enough to understand the volume surge around bond auction data releases yet chose to do an incredibly boneheaded bet (instead of some sort of more cloaked relative value trade that would make 10x as well, or just making a bet on something slightly less obvious like credit spreads or ETFs that are trade-war exposed, etc), or the participant was making a clumsy obvious swing for the fences, yet lucked into to the minute perfect timing to cloak the transaction. Meanwhile there is the simplest answer which is just that the position was part of the huge wave of trading around the bond auction results.
I'd welcome the investigation, but it's pretty shocking to me that I'm seeing so much discussion around this without these points being brought up!
I manage a portfolio and also put large blocks of options that benefit from market rallies on at exactly the same time. That's because Bond volatility was sky high, and once the results came in, one of the likely outcomes is a huge volatility crush. That means that if you have positions that you've been holding from executing off during the crisis due to elevated volatility, and have a view that the market is nearing the end of capitulation (all of the indicators that most fear, like liquidations, fear/greed index tanking, positioning being bearish, are huge bullish signals to the trading world), then in order to dodge the binary event risk you may want to re-add exposure at that moment. Readings from prime broker reports show that institutional participants were extremely low in positioning, so the risk that would need to be hedged for many would have been upside risk. If someone wants to hedge their upside risk but doesn't want to actively move out of their bearish/locked down positions during the crisis, they may well use options.
(Devil's advocate argument concluded)