Anyone who’s sat a tech table knows the teleprompter op has one quiet advantage over the room:
They know the next line.
Former White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez, per the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, put that advantage on a prediction market. Between December 2025 and February 2026, the CFTC says, he traded “mention market” event contracts — bets on whether specific words or phrases would land in a presidential speech — using advance access to prepared remarks. The agency says those trades generated more than $107,500 in profits.
Yes. There are markets where you can bet on a word.
And the person running prompter had the script.
In August 2026 the CFTC announced an order filing and settling charges against Perez. Under the order he must disgorge $107,539.02 in profits, pay a $65,000 civil monetary penalty, and take a three-year trading ban. The agency said the penalty was substantially reduced for his “exemplary cooperation.” The CFTC also thanked KalshiEX for assistance.
Net from knowing what was coming next: -$65,000 before the cost of legal counsel.
There’s a lesson here
Crews get handed confidential material every day—product launches, earnings decks, unreleased videos, major announcements, you name it. Most of the time it shows up as an emailed script, a USB drive, or a file dropped into the show folder, and the only thing anyone at the tech table cares about is whether it’s actually the final version.
But every once in a while, what’s in that file is worth something outside the room.
-CTC Staff
