How to Make Tens of Millions by Buying ACT 2 Seconds After Listing: How Is "News Trading" Achieved?

Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News

The theme of the afternoon of November 11 was clearly "explosive gains," while the hottest event in the morning was undoubtedly Binance listing two small-cap tokens, ACT and PNUT.

Before the news broke, the market cap of the ACT token was only around $20 million. Within eight minutes of the announcement, its market cap surged tenfold. Who could receive the news instantly, buy the token immediately, and capture this surge?

According to Lookonchain, a savvy trader made over $3 million in just one hour by monitoring newly listed tokens on Binance.

Within seconds after Binance announced the listing of ACT, he spent 1,558 SOL (approximately $320,000) to purchase 10.9 million ACT tokens, now worth $3.4 million—generating a profit of more than 20 million RMB within 10 minutes. (As of the time Lookonchain posted)

However, some users raised suspicions, calling it "front-running" or insider trading, pointing out that his purchase occurred seven seconds before the official Chinese listing announcement was published.

The allegations of insider trading sparked widespread debate—until the “Formula News” team stepped forward to claim responsibility for the trade and explained the timing discrepancy: Binance’s English announcement came earlier than the Chinese one. They monitored the English feed and executed their trade just 2.4 seconds after the announcement went live.

While such massive profits are naturally enviable, this incident has also brought renewed attention to a special category of trading known as “news trading.” By writing scripts, renting servers, and developing automated trading programs to monitor deterministic bullish events like new listings on Binance or Upbit, traders can often reap substantial profits simply by being faster. When a low-market-cap token surges tenfold, the windfall becomes truly enormous.

Opportunities favor the prepared. Vida, founder of Formula News—better known online as “Post-90s Wealthy Generation”—is a renowned news trader rumored to have reached A9-level wealth (1 billion RMB) through news trading in the previous cycle. His ability to execute the fastest buys is no coincidence, backed by deep technical expertise:

1. Study Binance's listing strategy:

Amid widespread speculation about Binance’s listing decisions, he summarized the following insights:

• Tokens with high trading volume and strong community interest on OKX or Bybit—regardless of whether they are VC-backed projects or memes—are likely to be listed first on futures contracts, because Binance doesn’t want liquidity from Binance users benefiting other exchanges.

• Meme coins with little to no trading activity on OKX and Bybit still stand a chance of getting spot or futures listings, as Binance aims to capture trending traffic and maintain a positive reputation within the community.

After scoring big from this news trade, he didn’t forget to praise Binance’s listing strategy under a tweet by Binance co-founder He Yi, who confirmed that ACT and PNUT were listed with zero listing fees.

• 2. Prepare and test for potential scenarios in advance

Traditional news trading is already extremely competitive—traders go to great lengths like installing direct phone lines or setting up offices right next to stock exchanges, all to gain fractional time advantages. Similarly, while Web3 news trading can be highly profitable, it also comes with barriers that are difficult for ordinary people to overcome: programming skills are required to build monitoring and auto-trading scripts; a single coding error could lead to significant financial loss; and expensive server rentals are necessary to ensure ultra-fast message reception and execution speed...

May this insight into news trading inspire you. Wishing everyone profits in this bull market.