Jones Beene wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
> Do you mean they bought 115,000 puts on American on 9/10
Yes. The day before.
or 115,000 shares on 9/10 (which is what you wrote)?
No, there was absolutely no hedge ! It was a straight short-sell from
the reports which have appeared in print, and they are not contradicted
AFAIK. That is what had immediately raised the suspicion of the SEC on
9/12, before the White House had a talk with them.
Thanks; it wasn't clear in the original note.
A minor nit: Buying puts is not the same as selling short.
Puts are options, which, like all options, can be sold again, up to
their expiration date. In this modern era, option prices sort of
more-or-less follow the Black-Sholes model and buying them isn't quite
the shot in the dark that it used to be. And in any case the risk is
bounded by the option price.
A single option is the right to sell (for a put) or buy (for a call) 100
shares of stock at a particular price, IIRC. The value of the option
depends on the current sale price of the stock and how far away the
expiration date is. 115,000 puts would presumably carry the right to
sell 11,500,000 shares of American stock, which sounds kind of
excessive...? Come to think of it, I would not have expected there to
be that many puts available for purchase. (You can't buy an option
unless someone else "writes" it first, and the supply of puts on any
particular stock is distinctly finite -- options are typically far less
liquid than shares of stock.)
Selling short, on the other hand, is done by actually borrowing shares
of stock and selling them, after which one is obligated to eventually
buy the stock in order to return the borrowed shares. Short selling has
costs associated with it which make it somewhat hard to make money on
it, and it generally carries more risk than buying puts (of course, you
can use margin to increase the risk of pretty much any investment to the
point where it's unacceptable). But you can short pretty much anything,
as it doesn't require anyone else's cooperation (a broker generally
handles finding a lender, and in fact the lender isn't event consulted
about the transaction, nor even typically aware of it).
Needless to say, there is no way to verify these details as true or not.
I don't understand. Where did the details originally come from? I
thought you said in an earlier message that it was a freedom of
information act filing, which should certainly produce a verifiable
record of some sort.
Had the 9/11 commission been truly independent and adversarial - as was
Kenneth Starr for instance- then yes, we could trust more of what they
said ... and be able to discover who actually placed the beyond-risky
short sell trade - as this is a huge gamble that NO institutional trader
would ever dare to make - with the money of others and WITHOUT the hedge
in palce to limit the downside loss.
What institutions are you thinking of?
The ones I'm aware of have things called by the totally inappropriate
name of "hedge funds" which are in the business of making risky trades.
There's an enormous amount of money in so-called hedge funds, and the
rule for those funds is that there are no rules -- the manager can
choose whatever vehicle suits his or her fancy, frequently without
hedging anything (despite the name), and if the fund drops half its
value in a year -- or a month -- well, you were warned.
What's more, institutional investors in general are known for doing
stupid things with other people's money.
Every broker will no doubt agree -
that without the hedge, the trader gets fired on the spot.
You have a very optimistic view of how thoroughly self-policed the
brokerage industry is.
Definite no-no.
...(which is the point which you were getting at, apparently)...
...but all of this info about Krongard had to be dug-up by others, since
the 9/11 commission was really no more than a rubber stamp for what the
White House was ordering them to say. Even worse, they were actively
impeding much of this information about Krongard.
Caveat. I find this stuff interesting, and worth reading, but do not
believe in the full extent of any high level conspiracy. Krongard may
have been near the top of the ladder. I do not buy the "missile theory"
or the fake passenger list or any of that other crap. The smoking gun is
WTC7 - building seven - and if Steven Jones had just stuck with just the
WTC7 as his main argument, then he would have found a lot more converts,
MANY more, as the other stuff is tenuous, at best, and ludicrous at
worst - and may have been planted to make the real damage seem to be
part of the same nut-case package.
However, there was definitely a signed and valid *demolition permit*
which had been issued by NYC to the WTC, following the old explosion in
the parking garage, and that was for the ENTIRE complex - as tenancy had
dropped way-off and they were intending to take the whole complex down,
regardless. There is zero argument about that, yet many casual observers
do not not know it. A photocopy of that demolition permit (circa 1997)
was on the net at one time, but appears to have been removed. At least
my link is dead.
And I agree that it would have been absolutely *unconscionable* for the
new owner to have allowed thousands of workers to continue to work
there, for the 3-4 years afterwards - in ignorance of this ! if the
buildings had already been fitted with the thermite - which is what
others are saying. Also the (over)insurance policy could never have been
issued, if this was known. Yet that is what some experts claim to see in
the video - clear evidence of timed sequential thermite detonation.
I have never knocked down a building. However I've spent hours -- no,
make that weeks -- in hardware labs staring at scope traces that were
nothing like what anyone expected, and I've spent decades of my life
looking at the results of software runs that didn't look anything like
what we had anticipated. I've learned a lesson from that: Predicting
what a complex system will do and how it will appear when it's subjected
to unexpected stresses is dicey, at best. Working in the high
performance computing arena, I've also learned something else: When you
scale a system up to 10 times the size you tested with, new and
completely unexpected effects appear.
Claims that the fall of the buildings "looked like" controlled
demolition and therefore must have been exactly that, along with claims
that certain features are "impossible to explain" unless explosives were
used (despite the fact that we've never seen a building of this sort and
of this size fall before, and hence have /no/ /idea/ what it "should"
look like as it comes down), strike me as very weak arguments.
Did the bottom floors have their windows blow out before the top floors
fell all the way down onto them? Hmm. I can't explain that. OH, wow
-- it can't be explained from what we already know about the way
buildings like this fall, so that proves it: it must have been due to
use of explosives!
Sure, just like the fact that there are glitches in the software which
can't always be explained must mean we have gremlins haunting the
machine room.
The buildings fell far more slowly than the speed of sound. But
vibrations and shock waves travel at the speed of sound. Ergo, the
bottom floors "knew" that something bad had happened to the top floors
long before the stack of pancakes landed on them, and the structure
could very well have responded in unexpected ways to the collapse of the
upper floors.
Whatever, proving anything by watching videos is a tough slog....
Jones
