Vanity Fair’s Trump Trade Story ‘Nonsensical,’ Exchange CEO Says

The head of the exchange where a Vanity Fair article last week argued a cabal of investors is suspiciously earning billions of dollars by trading before market-moving news says the transactions didn’t happen.

The article’s thesis is built atop a faulty reading of the trading record, said Terry Duffy, chief executive officer of CME Group Inc. He said it mistakenly summed up all volume for those derivatives during spans of time and implausibly attributed that buying and selling, spread across thousands of transactions, to a single bad actor or group of cheaters.

“It’s the most irresponsible thing I’ve ever...