"Casino Royale" - The new James Bond movie works 9/11 "put" options into plot!!!

[file83]

So I was watching the new Bond flic last night and to my surprise, "M" explains to Bond how the evil villain in the movie does his crimes.

She explains how on 9/11 there were unusually large put options placed on the airlines involved on 9/11. I can't remember what else she says - whether or not their evil villain was ever linked to the 9/11 options, but the villain in this movie is guilty of doing EXACTLY the same thing to another airline.

And here is the kicker: The villain is responsible for the CAUSE of the stock drops! In other words, he hires people to blow up a new plane prototype, expecting that the stock for the airline will drop, so he makes a ton of cash.

The obvious implication is that whomever was responsible for placing (yet never claimed) those put options on 9/11 was the SAME PERSON/ORGANIZATION RESPONSIBLE for arranging the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Some people might argue that the Bond movie is implying that 9/11 may have been orchestrated by some criminal (even Osama) and that it was proxies to Osama that placed his put options for him.

The problem with that theory is then, if that were the case, why didn't the FBI show the world that connection to Osama as the "smoking gun"?!!?

The 9/11 put options trail went "cold", according to official explanations. Bullshit. Follow the money because in the world of securities, you know where the money goes, ALWAYS.

Conclusion: the FBI is protecting someone. The question is why?

(by the way, the new Bond movie is AWESOME - I highly recommend it!)

[RedSock]

1. interesting

Right after 9/11, the suspicion that Osama or al-Qaeda had placed the puts was widely reported and discussed.

As soon as it appeared that the story was wrong -- about two weeks of the attacks -- all mention of the puts disappeared. I remember waiting for follow-ups in the New York Times at the end of September -- if it wasn't al-Qaeda, then who? -- but nothing.

Indeed, some news reports now call them "urban legends".

[TheWraith]

20. They're not legends, but they're not exactly news either.

The number of put options have been exaggerated in the retelling of the story, and most reports ignore the fact that there were solid reasons to anticipate those stocks falling. American Airlines stock had been falling for weeks, and so had United, both on bad news about the souring economy and corporate troubles. Most of the United put options were eventually traced back to one US investor with no suspicious ties--who had, incidentally, bought stock in American just days before 9/11, so he didn't make much money if any. The trading in AA on September 10th was largely the result of a "strong sell" recommendation issued on Sept. 9th by an influential stock newsletter.

[KJF]

24. There's a section on them in Terrorist Financing

Which you can find starting on page 145 (page 148 of the .pdf).
http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/911_TerrFin_Monograph.pdf

Briefly, they say that:
95% of the UAL puts traded on 6 September (i.e. not 95% of total puts for UAL, just 95% of those traded on 6 September) were traded by a single US investment advisor, whose CEO and trader said it was their idea to buy the puts. It also had 115,000 shares in American Airlines.

"Much" of the surge in volume of the puts in American on 10 September was traced back to a California investment advice newsletter.

"More than one third" of the puts for UAL purchased on 7 September were placed by a New York hedge fund that actually lost money, because it also had shares in United.

So we get 95% for one day, "much" for another and "more than one third" for the third day of suspicious trading in puts options. Maybe there's something to this, maybe there isn't, but the Commission's answer is not comprehensive, especially when you think that the entities (not even the newsletter) weren't named. We need more, really.

[Amused Musings]

2. So James Bond supports the "alternative" theories now

Imaginary allies for an imaginary cause

[petgoat]

3. There's nothing imaginary about it.

The put options were real. Real money was made on them, and the identity
of the profiteers is really being hidden by real US authorities.

The real 9/11 Commission really declined to investigate the alleged hijackers'
funding. Rather than "follow the money" as any organized crime investigation
would, they declared the issue to be of "little practical significance."

[LARED]

4. "being hidden by real US authorities."

Really, says who? You have no proof of that and you can't even establish that the put options were truly unusual.

[petgoat]

5. "Really, says who?"

Really, says the authorities themselves. They say the identity of the purchasers
is none of our damn business.

you can't even establish that the put options were truly unusual.

You're making up your facts. Can't?

"Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/19/eveningnews/main311834.shtml

"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."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/29/MN186128.DTL

Maybe if you learned to google your opinions wouldn't be so peculiar.

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

6. peculiar indeed ;-)

[AZCat]

8. Neither of these "sources" proves the put options were unusual.

Unless we know a little more about the statistical behavior of put options on these certain stocks, a 25Xavg day means nothing. And an article that claims "sources tell..." should be thrown in the garbage bin with every other POS article that uses the same pathetic trick.

[petgoat]

9. Right, and I can't prove that day is light and night is dark

cause night is pretty light when you get down to it, and
you could be wearing a blackout mask in the daytime.

Look, there's CBS, the SF Chron, and the London Times
saying it was suspicious. Play devils advocate if you
want but it's silly.

The London Times headline is "INSIDER TRADING APPARENTLY BASED
ON FOREKNOWLEDGE OF 9/11 ATTACKS"

http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/stockputs.html

[AZCat]

10. "Devil's advocate"?

You're kidding me. Considering how much (rightly deserved) flak the MSM gets around here (DU in general, not just this forum) for shoddy or incomplete reporting, how can you claim that it's silly to ask for a little more than what you have?

[petgoat]

17. The MSM gets flak for ignoring the story, not for reporting it. nt

[AZCat]

18. Bullshit.

Maybe you need to get out of this forum occasionally and inspect the rest of the site - it appears you have a flawed view of what goes on.

[truth01]

22. Worked on the street - the puts were foreknowledge

Worked on the street - the puts were foreknowledge. The government does not want to tell us who was behind them.

[LARED]

25. You worked on the street -Great!!!

Your notion that the put options were somehow linked to the perps of 9/11 would be greatly enhanced if you could provide some evidence that the magnitude or type of options placed were different than the hundreds of thousands of transactions made every month in the options market.

As you have worked on the street perhaps you can provide some real insight.

[LARED]

12. They say the identity of the purchasers is none of our damn business.

So who's "they"?

Regarding the put options,

From the 9/11 report

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options – investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price – surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 – highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI , aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

[petgoat]

16. " apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous."

Let's see, so the fact that the trades had no connection to al Qaeda made
them innocuous, huh?


So if Jay Leno was seen standing over Nicole Simpson's body with a bloody
knife in his hand, we'll just ignore that because the fact that Jay Leno
is not OJ makes his presence there innocuous? Is that the kind of
reasoning you rely on?

The fact that the trading activity also involved buying shares of American
is immaterial. Have you compared the volume of the put trades with the
115,000 shares purchased?

[zforce]

19. For some reason, I don't think Lared seen that one coming..n/t

[file83]

23. That's what I was thinking! Just because the people had "no conceivable tie" to Al-Qaida

they go ahead and call it innocuous?!? Did ever occur to them that maybe these "investors" were tied to the 9/11 plot in some other fashion? Even if it was only from "inside sources"?!

This is all a coverup, anyway you slice it.

[LARED]

26. What a dumb analogy.

For the sake of clarity, if 9/11 had never happened would the put options look unusual? If you really want to make your case, all you have to do is show that the put options would be abnormal on any given day regardless of events external to the market. That would show foreknowledge. That is using logic and reasoning.

Until then all you have is a growing body of knowledge that your average CT'er knows little about the options market.

[mhatrw]

34. Just read the sentence you provided.

The trades were considered innocuous because the traders had no known connection to al Qaeda.

Talk about presupposing what you are trying to prove ...

[HamdenRice]

27. I also worked on "The Street" and the OCT doesn't make sense

The official story claim is that the put options were the result of an investment strategy by a hedge fund that purchased 115,000 shares. So far so good, but you really have to understand how a hedge fund works.

One strategy of hedge funds is to exploit very small imperfections in the market. Ordinarily, if I purchased 115,000 shares with the hope of the stock going up, and then purchased puts covering 115,000 shares in the expectation of the shares going down, the transaction in a perfect market should be a complete wash, the two transactions cancelling each other out. In other words, the price of the put should exactly equal the probability of the share going up multiplied by the share price gain.

Hedge funds find imperfections in the market knowledge and pricing such that this transaction is not a wash.

But the key is that the hedge fund would have purchased puts covering exactly 115,000 shares. Puts are packaged to cover 100 shares, so this story would account for 1,115 only puts.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the market is designed to balance information and price very evenly so that the volume of bets that shares will go up perfectly balances the volume of bets that shares will go down.

An imbalance of 25x more puts is almost impossible without inside information possessed by one trader.

[LARED]

29. Question

Shoudn't this really say

The other thing to keep in mind is that the market is designed to balance information and price very evenly so that the volume value of bets that shares will go up perfectly balances the volume value of bets that shares will go down.

[HamdenRice]

30. No volume

Maybe a better way of saying it is that for every bet someone wants to sell, there is someone willing to buy its exact opposite. With respect to shares, pretty much the only time there has not been a buyer willing to mirror image a seller was during the stock market crashes of 1986 and 1929.

But of course, for shares, there are brokers called specialists who have to buy when no one else will. In one of the most interesting and scary moments of 1986, the specialists walked away from their posts and refused to buy.

But the bigger point is that that is why it is so anamolous for there to be such an imbalance of puts. If the options have been priced correctly by the market, and the players in the market has pretty much the same information, there should not be an imbalance.

[mhatrw]

33. Where can we find the results of the SEC's investigation?

When will these results be released to the public?

[mhatrw]

32. Where is the SEC study that the 9/11 Commission cited?

When will it be released in full to the public?

[CJCRANE]

7. I had this very same discussion

with a friend today.

He was accusing me of being a "conspiracy theorist" as usual so I asked him who paid the hijackers and he replied "Bin Laden".
So I then advised him to actually read the 9/11 Commission Report and the FBI website (neither of which of course say anything about Bin Laden funding 9/11).

[petgoat]

11. People make up facts to support their complacency.

I'd always assumed that it was four simultaneous surprise attacks
and the whole thing was over in 15 minutes.

When I finally read one of those crazy people's booklets and learned
there was no air defense for 100 minutes I said "Woah! If even
half of what's in this booklet is true, we're in deep shit!"
Everything in that booklet was true.

[LARED]

13. People make up facts to support all sorts of

notions that enter their heads. What makes you immune from this?

[AZCat]

14. Don't you get it?

You must not be one of the "special people" immune to all sorts of logical fallacies or human foibles. That must be why you have to rely on logic and science.

[petgoat]

15. What makes me immune?

My post was a story about how I'd made up a fact to support my complacency,
and your response is to ask me what makes me immune to making up facts?

[savemefromdumbya]

21. The evil villain is Cheney

who was 007?

[file83]

28. Osama is 007?

:rofl:

[savemefromdumbya]

31. Or Obama?

shaken but not stirred

[dailykoff]

35. Best Bond movie I've seen

but I haven't seen any of the the early ones. Dated as hell, though. Sad to think that the whole premise is shot now Junior and his boys let the cat out of the bag on 9/11.

So when does 007 get to find out that MI6 and the "terrorists" are the same damn bunch of crooks?

[Nozebro]

36. Excellent question

"So when does 007 get to find out that MI6 and the "terrorists" are the same damn bunch of crooks?"