William D. Cohan

In 2019, Cohan alleged the possibility that US president Donald Trump or someone close to him had used advance knowledge of political developments to profit from insider trading, publicized in two articles for Vanity Fair titled "'Who Knew Trump Would Offer a Truce With Xi?': The Mystery of the Wall Street Trump Trades" and "'There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On': The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump Chaos Trades".. Cohan's second article caused congressional representatives Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice to call for a federal investigation, but several experts interviewed by Bloomberg questioned the evidence, while Cohan stood by the article but distanced himself from the implied conclusion ("I don’t make any allegations, I don’t know what really happened"). Writing in Slate, Felix Salmon called Cohan's articles "bullshit", arguing that he had no evidence that the trades in question were unusual, or that they had yielded the alleged profits, or that insider knowledge had been involved at all. Further, Terry Duffy, the CEO of CME Group Inc, the company that operates the exchange where the futures trade, questioned Cohan's understanding of the data, "[Cohan] 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."

Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism, and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Since 2013, he has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

In 1991 he married editor Deborah Gail Futter in a Jewish ceremony.

Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration.