Are you serious? Bloomberg and other news sites regularly move or remove old stories so old links won't work. Come on. I thought most people knew that. Here is another link from 09/13 about the US markets staying closed until the following monday. Same result. Maybe since the story doesn't exist anymore on the site that didn't happen either. LOL! http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cg...n&middle=ad_frame2_topfin&s=AO6EW.xURVS5TLiBT No I did not make the link up. It was taken from this ET thread which has the actual article pasted. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=18554
Let's add some market reality to this. Imagine a marketmaker that sees a HUGE number of bids for puts? "Paper coming, locals hiding". I would NEVER sell or buy any options under such conditions unless I was compensated by real nice implied vol. And I mean REAL nice. The skew in such market would go into a frown (since according to the article everyone was selling calls and buying puts) - nobody would trade, everyone would hide. Anyone who would see such p/c ratio would go short on the stock - and portfolio managers watch this kind of stuff like hawks. did the equity price change (and it would change a lot) - nope, it did not. the surrounding index options would react too. did the implied vol for ^XAL change much - nope, did not. I suspect there might have been one or two extra orders, I have seen an article on bloomberg regarding something like that, but the 280X numbers look clearly made up. Also, if these people (CIA director, we said?) where that smart, they would not go this route - there are plenty of less visible ways of making a buck in a crisis like this, for example, by going long on the swap spread.
Here is an article from USA today from 9/14 saying they are investigating suspicious trades in Japan, US, and Europe. No specifics about the actual trades though. http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/2001-09-14-dubious-trade-probe.htm
Apparently some prices did. ------------------------- Bin Laden associates may have profited from terror attacks By Robert Windrem NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT Sept. 15 â The Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra reported Saturday that associates of Islamic fanatic Osama bin Laden might have used short-selling to make a profit on Tuesdayâs terror bombing. The newspaper said the FBI is looking into possible short-selling of the stocks of reinsurance companies in the four trading days before the terrorist attacks on the United States on Tuesday. Short-selling can produce huge profits when a stock plummets because of bad news. REINSURANCE FIRMS ASSUME risk by providing backup insurance for insurance companies. The stocks of the three reinsurance companies â AXA in France, Munich Re in Germany and Swiss Re in Switzerland â dropped 13 percent to 15 percent in the week before the attack. Analysts suggested at the time that the drops were anomalous â unexplained â since the reinsurance business was healthy and premium payments were on the way up. In fact, before the terrorist attacks, the Financial Times on Tuesday published a positive report on the industry. http://www.msnbc.com/news/629380.asp?0dm=C16MN ---------------------------- Link no longer works, wonder why? Ooh conspiracy! Maybe it's just an old story!
well said, sle. this is obviously totally bogus information, but people still believe. as you know, during the depression, short sellers were hunted down and blamed for the situation. in addition, there is an actual "terror future market" that is trying to function at this time, after the dapra one was closed. best, surfer
Here are some links from non-alternative news sources. I don't believe in some elaborate conspiracy theory involving the CIA etc. But, I don't find it hard to believe that people who knew about the attack would try to profit from it. http://www.usatoday.com/money/general/2001-09-26-suspicious-trading.htm http://www.usatoday.com/money/general/2001-09-21-suspect-options.htm http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic.../archive/2001/09/22/BU27558.DTL&type=business http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2001/09/26/cnterror26.xml http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=795691
"Looking at the numbers, it's not a smoking gun kind of thing," says Mike Epstein of Deutsche Bank. "It was in keeping with market action at the time." "There was a fundamental reason for some of the put activity," says Chris Johnson of Schaeffer's Investment Research, noting that the market was anticipating bad news in the airline sector. "Once we factor in the fact that there was news, that starts to take away from the coincidence." thats the quote from the usa today link
After checking directly with bloomberg.com this is their response on past articles: Feedback Status: TicketID: W00077435100370542276 Status: Resolved Summary: Archived News LOG: 9/19/03 16:24:36 Your Initial Feedback How can I find out news stories aired by bloomberg or posted in bloomberg's site? What search engine do you have available in your site? I need to search within specified time intervals, looking news for 2-3 years back Thanks LOG: 9/22/03 09:17:47 Bloomberg Feedback Team Hello, and thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, our free website does not archive nor have historical information. We are sorry we cannot assist you. Sincerely, Bloomberg Website Team. This would explain why links directly referring to those "elusive" bloomberg articles do not work. Does this prove that the bloomberg article waS never there and all all the links referring to it as bogus fabrications? And if so many intentionally are misquoting a source like bloomberg in a matter of such significance, wouldn't bloomberg at least respond and deny it? What we need is some historical option volume daily data just before 9/11/2001 for the stocks mentioned, UAL AMR DAL...
.....why not just ask them bluntly if they ran that article??? Surely, with all the web sites citing it, there must have been previous requests for it?????