Welcome to April, 2009

I checked my Fender Custom Shop daily desk calender this morning, and I am pretty sure it said April 22nd, 2009, Earth Day at that. Troofers, however, always seem to think it is still mid-September 2001, and ignore everything we have learned since then. Take this post today on 911 Blogger:

On September 19, 2001 the Chicago Tribune reported that regulators around the world were investigating in attempts to discover if terrorists or individuals who knew of the upcoming events profited through the purchase of put options in financial markets. The 9/11 Commission conceded, “some unusual trading did in fact occur” however, it was claimed, “each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation.”
The put options volume on Boeing and United Airlines were 4 to 5 times above the daily put volume data prior in the year. The data on record shows no similar trade volume was placed on any other airline stock symbol during the same period of time.

OK, that was 7 1/2 years ago. Might want to find some newer information. The poster continues:

The reasoning behind the Commission’s decision and why no charges were filed was due to the fact that 95 percent of the puts were purchased by a U.S. based institutional investor who was said to have been investigated thoroughly by the FBI and SEC and had no conceivable ties to al Qaeda. News and market analysts, as well as all of the supporting evidence suggests the parties who own these puts had to have had advanced knowledge of the attacks. While officially all of the trades placed in the weeks leading up to the attacks were found to be innocuous, the hard evidence and the exponential increase of put options suggests otherwise.

Hey, guess what, the 9/11 Commission released their internal memorandums on this several months ago. You can read it for free even.

A U.S-based investment advisor registered with the SEC purchased 2,000 UAL puts on September 6, constituting 96% of the volume. The SEC's Eric Ribelin and Andrew Snowden interviewed both the CEO of the advisor and the trader who executed the transaction. They received the innocuous explanation for the trade which is set forth in the SEC report. [See Report at 9 (explaining the advisor manages hedge funds with $5.3 billion under management, was pursuing a bearish strategy with respect to most airlines stocks in response to recent bad news announcements, and had actually purchased 115,000 shares of AMR on September 10, believing the negative information on AMR was already reflected in the price).]

Welcome to 2009.