Abnormal Insurance put options prior to 911

We understand that put options were placed on united and american airlines prior to 911. But there was also other put options also on Insurance companies with holding in UL and AA and the building that were destroyed or damaged.

www.fromthewilderness.com...
"Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6. Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at least $1.2 million.
. Sept. 6-10, 2001 - Highly abnormal levels of put options are purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re(insurance) which owns 25 percent of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly impacted by the Sept. 11 attacks. [Source: ICT, above;
FTW, Oct. 18, 2001,

- "Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the WTC Towers, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day [a 1200% increase!]. When trading resumed, Merrill's shares fell from $46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000 option contracts were bought by "insiders," their profit would have been about $5.5 million.


- "European regulators are examining trades in Germany's Munich Re, Switzerland's Swiss Re, and AXA of France, all major reinsurers with exposure to the Black Tuesday disaster." [FTW Note: AXA also owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock making the attacks a "double whammy" for them.]

We should also consider that the wall street fell 900 points three weeks prior to 911 and in effect a major stock market crash is imminent.

If warren buffett sat on the boards he would have know about the unusual put options on the Insurance companies and the airlines by just being the trader that he was and since his insurance broker companies lost 70 billion in this attack one would think he would be beefing about such an event.


[edit on 11-9-2006 by mondegreen]

www.rense.com...
17. An abnormal amount of put stock options were purchased against United and American Airlines right before 911. Gee whiz I wonder why British Airways, Southwest Airlines, Continental or other Airlines did not have abnormally large amounts of put stock options purchases also? Why did it just so happen to be from the two airlines that were involved with the 911 incident? It was reported that many Israelis and even an ex-CIA director from Deutsche bank made huge profits on the purchase. One person made as much as $2,500,000.00 on the deal and when last reported did not come to pick up his money. How did all these people know that American and United Airlines stocks will drop so dramatically in value the next day???

Not only airline stocks but according to the Barnes Review, " Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as Israeli citizens, sold "short" a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks. These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be "in the millions of dollars."
www.snopes.com...
Accelerated investments speculating a downturn in the value of Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch (two New York investment firms severely damaged by the World Trade Center attack) were also observed.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the "9/11 Commission") investigated these rumors and found that although some unusual (and initially seemingly suspicious) trading activity did occur in the days prior to September 11, it was all coincidentally innocuous and not the result of insider trading by parties with foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks:
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 — instruments 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. The SEC and 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.

We see that the 911 commission turned away real information that would paint a trail of who profited from the put options and why if the fbi is not interested does not the outstanding profits not being picked up and not being left sitting. If I had several millions in profits waiting for me I would go pick them up.

Absent this information on the "customer" one has to assume that the trade was "a position" taken by the firm itself. This would be considered to be a trade for the "house account" rather than for the customer's account and the firm itself would be liable for any losses or they would benefit from any gain.

Mystery transactions just can not occur in any reasonable legal regulatory approved manner.
Bottom line re: the Alex Brown options. there has to be a paper trail of:
1. broker
2. customer
3. customer's particulars incl. name, address, tax id, settlement instructions.

If there is not:
1. fraudulent trade
2. trade for house account
3. somebody is trying to BS somebody into believing that they don't know who placed the order.

www.insideoptions.com...
These criminals wanted fast, leveraged profits, secrecy, and didn’t want to tip-off the stock market by ‘shorting’ shares of the airlines out in the open. So they went to the options market first. ("Put" options go UP in value when the underlying stock goes DOWN in price)

And even though this is a painful reminder of what happened to America – the fact remains... “in-the-know” & “smart money” nearly always shows up on the option exchanges FIRST before major events of news happen in the future.
“Black Tuesday: The World’s Largest Insider Trading Scam even though a law was broken and the names are know to the 911 commission there were no charges and everyone went home rich and happy.
Who can help get the names of a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as Israeli citizens, sold "short" a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks. These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be "in the millions of dollars."

www.rumormillnews.com...
One large UAL put order was sent to the bustling CBOE floor in the days prior to September 11 by a customer of Deutsche Bank. The primary trading post for UAL expected to handle the whole 2,500-contract order. Instead, the customer split that into chunks of 500 contracts each, directing each order to various exchanges around the country simultaneously, according to people familiar with the trade. Moreover, some of the options have yet to be exercised, possibly because those customers' accounts have been frozen.
This information gives reason that the feds have all the information and are not releasing it? What are the names of the people that did this since members doing trading must have personal ID accounts set up and bank account numbers.
So, as Deep Throat suggested in the Watergate scandal, maybe investigators should follow the money -- to the S&P index options.

www.globalresearch.ca...

According to Phil Erlanger, a former Senior Technical Analyst with Fidelity , and founder of a Florida firm that tracks short selling and options trading, insiders made off with billions (not mere millions) in profits by betting on the fall of stocks they knew would tumble in the aftermath of the WTC and Pentagon attacks. [www.erlangersqueezeplay.com... ] Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German Parliament, once responsible for the oversight of the German secret services, estimated that profits by insider traders were $15 billion. CBS offered a far more conservative figure when it reported (Sept 26) that "at least seven countries are dissecting suspicious trades that may have netted more than $100 million in profits."
Suspicious trading was first identified by Japanese authorities. But soon concerns were raised and a pattern could be discerned in countries around the world including Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany and Canada. Jonathan Winer, an ABC News Consultant said "it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the US to North America to Europe." [World News Tonight, Sept. 20, 2001]
Thirty-eight companies were placed on a SEC list and circulated amongst brokerages that placed the put options on behalf of clients. These included among many others, TD Waterhouse, NFS (subsidiary of Fidelity of Boston), Alex Brown/Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers. [The San Francisco Chronicle; AP]. In the January 2002 Congressional record, an informal survey conducted by Levin-Grassley staffs, revealed that 10 of 22 responding securities and brokerage firms, managed accounts for 45,000 offshore clients.

Remember that Goldman sachs had the Gold in the WTC.s and this is beginning to point to the 160 billion in gold that was removed from the bank vaults just prior to and on 911.
Analysts also noted that though the insurance sector was one of the strongest in a depressed stock market, there were huge spikes in put options in Marsh & McLennan and in Citigroup. Marsh & McLennan, the biggest insurance broker, was a World Trade Center tenant with 1,700 employees. It also saw, next to UAL, the highest spike in put options; thus you have a confluence of facts that, in the minds of many experienced traders and experts, amounts to unequivocal evidence of foul play. Clearly traders placed bets based on sure-fire insider prior knowledge. The odds against this happening randomly or coincidentally are astronomical; probably incalculable.
Unusual high volume in pre-attack 5 year bond trading The Wall Street Journal reported on October 2 that the Secret Service had begun a probe into an unusually high volume of five-year US Treasury note purchases made prior to the attacks. The Treasury note transactions included a single $5 billion trade. The Journal noted that "Five-year Treasury notes are among the best investments in the event of a world crisis, especially one that hits the US.

This information indicates that not only was news about put options tightly with held from American, but many investigations such as the 911 commission. The entire stock market including bonds up to 5 billion dollars in treasury buys were inacted just before 911.
There are fears now that early 'naysayers' may have let a hot trail to go cold and allowed the terrorist insiders to cover their tracks. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the FBI's Dennis Lormel said on October 3, 2001 before Congress that there were "no flags or indicators" referring to mere "rumors" about the pre-attack insider trading.
There are estimates of several trillion dollars in short trading in effected companies, commodities, treasury bonds and oil puts.
Why has this not been investigated in the fullest.






[edit on 12-9-2006 by mondegreen]