By Priya Raman

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating crude-oil trades that covered at least 6 million barrels in two minutes on March 23, more than 8.5 times the prior week’s comparable volume.

Chairman Michael Selig said on Bloomberg Television on Friday that enforcement staff have scrutinized Iran-war trades since March 23, when trading surged before President Donald Trump retreated from threats against Iran’s power plants.

What made the March 23 trading unusual?

Traders unloaded Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) contracts covering no fewer than 6 million barrels over just two minutes early on March 23, according to Bloomberg. Volumes also climbed sharply at other points that spring before several Trump announcements, stoking concern that traders may have acted on non-public information.

The sequence matters. So does the scale.

Selig said: “Our enforcement division has been looking at all these trades. We take this stuff very seriously.” He added: “We are on top of this and, rest assured, people can have confidence in the markets as long as I’m in the seat.”

The inquiry asks whether those pre-announcement spikes reflected an information advantage rather than ordinary changes in positions as traders responded to war risk. Selig’s assurance addresses confidence; it does not explain the trading pattern under review.

Why did the referral withdrawal matter?

According to Bloomberg, a CFTC political appointee instructed market-monitoring staff to withdraw an enforcement referral (a formal referral to investigators). The referral had flagged questionable trading around Trump’s decision to hold off on attacking Iran’s power plants.

CFTC Enforcement Director David Miller, speaking at a conference in New York, said in response that the agency had probed the trading from the beginning and that the investigation remains open, according to Reuters. The referral reversal did not, in his account, stop the inquiry.

Investor advocates and lawmakers have voiced alarm that the CFTC’s enforcement work has been tapering off, according to Reuters. The agency is also losing staff while overseeing a growing prediction-markets industry (event-based contracts that pay out on an outcome), placing more surveillance demands on a reduced team.

How are election contracts being screened?

Selig said the CFTC is monitoring prediction markets for signs of tampering before the U.S. midterm elections. Miller said staff have investigated cases and may have open investigations involving some candidates who placed trades on contracts based on their own elections, according to Reuters.

That screening covers a conflict that sits inside the market itself: a candidate whose election is the subject of a contract can also become a trader in that contract. The CFTC’s review therefore extends beyond market manipulation to the integrity of election-linked trading.

What do the linked Iran-war bets show?

Suspicious trading tied to the Iran conflict has drawn scrutiny in prediction markets too. Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps (a company that analyses blockchain transaction data) flagged nine linked Polymarket accounts that won more than $2.4 million on bets about U.S. military outcomes in the conflict.

The nine-account cluster adds a second route for regulators to test information asymmetry, or the possibility that traders acted on knowledge unavailable to others. That is a separate strand from the CFTC’s crude-futures inquiry, but it raises the same market-confidence question.

How serious is the staffing strain?

The CFTC has shed staff, and its enforcement caseload (the body of open enforcement work) has shrunk since 2024. Those developments sit uneasily with Selig’s promise of close oversight across oil futures, prediction markets and election-linked contracts.

The strategic tension is straightforward. The regulator says it is on top of the oil inquiry while also monitoring prediction markets and possible election-related misconduct. Investors and policymakers will look for evidence that the agency can identify who traded, what information they held and whether official announcements were preceded by unusual trading.

Miller’s statement supplies the immediate reassurance: the oil investigation remains open despite the withdrawn referral. The unanswered issue is whether the agency can turn that scrutiny into a credible account of the March 23 trades and the linked prediction-market activity.