I will summarize the case, then move on because there is no point in repeating:
Generally I don't trust the government. Thus when one government body investigates another one, I tend to be suspicious, and highly sceptical. Using common sense also help a lot.
The SEC never finished its investigation or issued a closing finding on it. I find that interesting. The 911 Commission is a different body with different goals. It was against their best interest to find anybody in the government with foreknowledge of the attacks and not trying to prevent it.
The media first reported widely the unusual stock and option activities, but when it started to come out that the put buyings were done not by the terrorists but by people on our side, the whole news were dropped like hot potato.
The difference in probabilities in a game and in crime is huge.
I buy 1 coincidence, I even buy 2 coincidences, but when we have 10 of them, we have a smoking gun.
Let's get a quick list of companies with unusual activities for the last time:
- airlines: UAL, AMR
- financial :Merrill, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America
- military: Raytheon
- reinsurance: Munich Re, AXA group, Swiss Re
- 5 year US treasury notes
Again, we have 10 coincidences here. But the biggest coincidence is Mr. Krongard, an executive director of the CIA who used to chair the very same unit of Detusche Bank where most of the put buying occured in Germany. 3 days later the executive for the very same unit (Alex Brown) resigns without any explanation. Geee, that's what I call coincidence!
Now going back to the Commission report, they only explained the 2 airlines, not in a very statisfactory way. Funny thing was they brought up AIG, but nobody asked them about AIG. It looks like they were happy to find an explanation and threw it in to help their case.
Quote from Pabst:
but don't get hung up on BS like 900% of normal volume, blah , blah, blah. Equity options aren't real volume heavy. I've seen stocks that trade 30 options a day suddenly trade 10,000 in a day because a random manager decides to use some esoteric strategy.
I know but it would have helped the SEC/Commission's case if they pointed out a few examples in the week prior 9/11. And see what I said about 10 coincidences.
I would BET BLIND that we would find a couple of DOZEN stocks with weird volume preceeding 9/11.
Don't bet, show.
But again, we are getting back to probabilities. Let's say you find 20 more unrelated companies with unusually high option volume. That would be still 30% high volume activities happening in 9/11 related companies, and compared to that we have like 6000 stocks, a very low probability.
No one SMART enough to concoct this plan would be STUPID enough to trade U.S. Exchange traded options.
Well, a good point but:
- there are stupid criminals too. So just because we think it is stupid to do so, that doesn't prevent people actually doing it.
- what if we had more people/groups doing the buying and they all diversified (thus buying relative small number of puts), but they happened to diversify all into the same companies, thus altogether made a splash?
Generally I agree, I had just shorted ES, the most liquid future and nobody would have ever noticed the volume. But the guys forgot to call me first...