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Re: put options --
On September 19, 2001, CBS reported:
Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market.
An extraordinary number of trades were betting that American Airlines stock price would fall.
The trades are called "puts" and they involved at least 450,000 shares of American. But what raised the red flag is more than 80 percent of the orders were "puts", far outnumbering "call" options, those betting the stock would rise.
Sources say they have never seen that kind of imbalance before, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Normally the numbers are fairly even.
After the terrorist attacks, American Airline stock price did fall obviously by 39 percent, and according to sources, that translated into well over $5 million total profit for the person or persons who bet the stock would fall.
***
At least one Wall Street firm reported their suspicions about this activity to the SEC shortly after the attack.
The same thing happened with United Airlines on the Chicago Board Options Exchange four days before the attack. An extremely unbalanced number of trades betting United's stock price would fall — also transformed into huge profits when it did after the hijackings.
"We can directly work backwards from a trade on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. The trader is linked to a brokerage firm. The brokerage firm received the order to buy that 'put' option from either someone within a brokerage firm speculating, or from one of the customers," said Randall Dodd of the Economic Strategy Institute.
U.S. investigators want to know whether Osama bin Laden was the ultimate "inside trader" — profiting from a tragedy he's suspected of masterminding to finance his operation. Authorities are also investigating possibly suspicious trading in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Japan.
On September 29, 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out:
"Usually, if someone has a windfall like that, you take the money and run," said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Whoever did this thought the exchange would not be closed for four days.
"This smells real bad."
***
There was an unusually large jump in purchases of put options on the stocks of UAL Corp. and AMR Corp. in the three business days before the attack on major options exchanges in the United States. On one day, UAL put option purchases were 25 times greater than the year-to-date average. In the month before the attacks, short sales jumped by 40 percent for UAL and 20 percent for American.
***
Spokesmen for British securities regulators and the AXA Group also confirmed yesterday that investigations are continuing.
The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of the options.
***
Last weekend, German central bank president Ernst Welteke said a study pointed to "terrorism insider trading" in those stocks.
Also:
http://www.thecanadiancharger.com/page.php?id=5&a=1247Excerpt:
What you have is the 9/11 Commission report, and here it is pointed out , that there has been insider trading, but that this insider trading cannot be traced to [al-Qaeda leader] Osama bin Laden, which means that it is highly unlikely that it had been Bin Laden.
Question: If this is not pursued any further, what does it mean?
Daniele Ganser: This means that the investigation of the terrorist attacks was incomplete, and always at the point where there are contradictions to the story, no further investigations are made. It looks very much as if one wants to examine only one story, the investigation is therefore one-sided. But this does not only apply to the put options. [31]
Interestingly enough, when Dr Ganser points out in his reply that this important data is not published, it is actually only half of the truth. Why?
The answer is very simple and odd at the same time: David Callahan, the editor of the US magazine SmartCEO, filed a request to the SEC about the put options which occurred prior to September 11 within the framework of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The SEC informed Callahan in its reply of December 23, 2009 under the number "09 07659-FOIA" as follows: This letter is in response to your request seeking access to and copies of the documentary evidence referred to in footnote 130 of Chapter 5 of the September 11 (9/11) Commission Report... We have been advised that the potentially responsive records have been destroyed. [32]
Therefore, we will unfortunately never know exactly how the SEC and the 9/11 Commission came to their conclusions regarding the 9/11 put options trading for their final report, because relevant documents were not only held back, but also destroyed - and that in spite of an agreement between the SEC and the National Archive of the United States, in which the SEC has agreed to keep all records for at least 25 years. [33]