Looks like nobody wants to analyze trades from pdf attached in the post #1. Moderators, could you please move this thread to Politics and Religion Section. Thank you.
Actually, that's exactly what I did before I came to my conclusion. Low-delta, tight spreads, essentially digitals, nicely diversified across assets. As I said, it's a true and tried method for giving bribes (used to be futures straddles, but the brokers got burned on them). But of course, by all means, lets dissect her trading method...
Given that trading records are public, you might as well meet in a parking garage and give a sack with a dollar sign on it.
A stack of cash is nice, but kinda impractical - there is a reason why mafia expends significant resources on money laundering. In this case, both parties can claim that they did "a trade" that had an economic meaning and unless there is other evidence there is nothing to charge them with, no matter how improbable that is. The future president of the US has done some serious futures trades that are even more improbable but nothing stuck.
In india, every once in a while they will raid a politicians house for corruption. There will be closets full of currency (Pablo Escobar style).
What's with this "she's only a teacher" crap? It's very possible that, as SLE pointed out, there's something shady going on. That has nothing to do with the both nonsensical and highly insulting idea that any who was once a teacher lacks the intellectual capacity to put on option trades. Now if you'd said "she's only a member of congress" you might be on to something...
Haha sorry I was just sarcastically echoing what someone else said earlier. Regarding analyzing her trades, I was able to import them to Excel from the pdf file (no mean feat). If anyone wants to make sense of the trades to glean a strategy from them here's a csv you can open in Excel or whatever:
The Donald? Trading futures? Who is this lady's broker? This one should be relatively easy to explore to see if there's funny stuff going on, I would imagine.
Never know! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_psychology
I did some more detailed analysis and while I get your concept it seems highly unlikely here. On 6/28 it looks like she sold an Aug 19 1950/1900 put credit spread on SPX. On 6/28 the S&P500 had a low of 2006, so that was a spread starting roughly 50 points below spot roughly 45 days out. I know this is a very rough comparison both with times and current implied vol, but when I price out a Sep 23 2125/2075 put credit spread today I get -8.30/-7.30. If you were trying to execute that at the best price you could as a seller of the spread you'd be able to get 5 cents past mid, so $7.75. If you tried to loose money on it as a buyer of the spread, the worst you could do would be to pay $8.25, a delta of only $.50. That seems like a pretty inefficient way to transfer money, I'm showing a margin of $6,000 for that spread so I could only lay on <3 contracts in the $1,000 to $15,000 band, netting me $150 of "transferred" money. I think the most OTM one would be on 6/1 where she did an Aug 31 1750/1725 when the S&P 500 low was 2085, so roughly 325 points and 60 days. The current rough equivalent would be an Oct 7 1850/1825 which currently is at -.85/-.15, so a mid of $.50 and max "illicit profit" of $.30 but again a $6,000 margin per contract so netting $90 total "transferred" through that transaction. Granted these are inexact calculations, but even if they're off by an order of magnitude this is a pretty useless way to launder money. If she's using this as a method to transfer money she's at most transferred a couple thousand dollars while exposing herself to a bunch of risk that both her trades go the wrong way and that she is accused of acting nefariously exactly as we've seen here. Absent more compelling detailed analysis to the contrary (which I'd love to see, please check my work here), I'd say this is just a newbie picking up nickels in front of a steamroller, as we see expounded on right here on ET every day. In fact she might even be one of us!