Posted on 07/16/2005 1:38:48 PM PDT by wagglebee
After this investigation let's see why oil is overvalued for the last two years. Let's also investigate why gasoline jumped $.10 a week prior to London explosions and then an extra $.10 the day after.
Well, remember that in the wake of 9/11 there was a lot of speculation that OBL had somehow "shorted" airlines or other stocks . . . but an investigation by the NYSE showed no unusual movements before 9/11.
Marc Rich would be a good candidate, considering his shady ME oil connections.
Somebody will have to check the records of the Klintoon Adult Bookstore & Massage Parlor and Hitlery's campaign fund to see if their "cut" came in.
Whoever regularly reads the "Terrorist Finance" section of The Wahabbi Saudi Journal, I guess.
LMAO!
It appears that a spike in shorting of a specific industry or commodity may be an early indicator of some sort of attack.
We know, after the fact, that airlines stock were heavily shorted for a short period pre 9/11.
We know after the fact, that the pound was heavily shorted.
Which begs the question, was there, or why wasn't there, any intelligence agency noting/tracking short stock sales and/or puts ?
Because everything that is traded is shorted all of the time anyway out of mere speculation. The better method would be to identify the most likely people who may be trading based on knowledge of future attacks and intensely monitor their trades. However, even this would at best signal the probability of an attack, it wouldn't necessarily give any clues as to when or where the attack might occur.
This sort of scheme is better known as a variant of the ''Tobin tax'', after the chap who thought it up. Typical academic, if you get my drift here, and I'm ashamed to have attended the college he has infested for some decades.
The GOOD news is that, by trading either futures or options on futures instead of spot and forward forex, even IF this idiotic tax would be implemented by the UNazis or assorted gov'ts, any American citizen is immune.
Why? Because we trade futures and futures options on currencies right here in the US, in Chicago -- no 'foreign' component to it, hence Kofi can take his tax and stick it in Idi Amin's cannibal freezer.
Now, there is of course the chance that the feckless and incompetent idiots in the Regress will pass a law that changes this game, esp. toward something like a Tobin tax, and generally and naturally in an unfavourable manner for the trader.
That's all right (at least for now) -- got it covered. Pls pardon me if I don't put the details right out here in public. The tactic(s) the trader will use if such statute is made into ''law'' are and will remain thoroughly lawful; it's just, as ever, that the politicos and their moochers will hate to have to deal with it (and won't even know how, into the bargain).
Think ''Prohibition'', on a much grander scale, and w/o the (cough) ''contributions'' to that ''noble'' cause from such as Marranzano, Luciano, and Capone. The trader will not have any recourse to methods such as employed by those criminals; he will simply go about his business in a slightly different fashion.
BTW, one encouraging thought for you. Anyone can treat ccy trading as gambling, but this is idiocy. The 'house edge', in terms both of the bid-ask spread and the information risk (info risk = ''What did Greenbean say to the Pres in private?'' We don't know, but other traders do, and we are therefore at risk because of insufficient timely info) is far greater in forex and ccy futures trading than at a casino.
Therefore, it behooves the person who WOULD trade forex or ccy futures to use various strategies that are NOT information-dependent. Sadly, most of this group of traders do not do so, believing (sometimes rightly, but mostly wrongly) that they can trade the ''swings'' successfully using assorted methods.
More power to them. I don't believe that, and do not trade swings, EVER. We'll see who wins out in the long run...and yr hmbl srvnt WILL be still in the mkts in the long run.
First, you need a time machine. I'm not being facetious; the trading rules of the futures mkts have changed radically, and much for the better, since Hitlery made her little score.
She didn't trade squat, m'friend, her ''profit'' was a straight political payoff, not dissimilar in any way from laundering drug profits, and it was accomplished as follows:
It used to be the case for futures brokers, that, if they had, let's just say, 30 clients trading in a mkt and all the clients wanted to get long (i.e. buy futures) on said mkt, presumably on the brokerage's recommendation, that our hero (the broker) would buy 200-300-500 lots, whatever amount in that mkt on a given day. Then, after the close of said mkt, he would portion out the purchases, 5 lots here, 10 lots there, 50-odd sometimes, to the clients. The larger clients (or, in Hitlery's case, the more favoured ones) were assigned the futures contracts with the **best**, i.e. lowest, price on purchase. Less favoured clients received the worst buy prices.
This was the practice known as ''allocation''. Today, and thank goodness, it is thoroughly illegal. Rather amazingly in retrospect, at the time (late 1970s), this practice was merely frowned upon, both by regulators and brokerages. Go figure, eh? (w!)
Now, the truly fascinating part about Hitlery's ''trading'' is that -- and I've seen the trading statements, you can too by applying to the U.S. Attorney -- in her ''trading'', she was short the LC mkt almost always. This is curious in the extreme, in that the cattle mkt, during her ''trading'' career, was undergoing one of the single largest bull moves in history at the time.
A very ugly joke on, and pastiche of, trading, and it's just a plain damned shame she's never been forced to disgorge these illicit profits.
You want to trade, fine. More power to you, and I hope you prosper. You want to ''trade'' as Hitlery did? OK, fine. Do it in some other nation, and be sure to have a VERY good sleazeball attorney.
FReegards to you!
As far as the currency trading, from what little I know, when word gets out that a currency is being heavily speculated, it becomes almost a "feeding frenzy" and everyone is trying to cover their own positions. Additionally, the main units of traded currency are the US dollar, the British pound, the Euro and Yen, just knowing the pound was being shorted wouldn't necessarily even indicate what part of the world an attack would occur in.
No chance to track who did what. Sorry, but NO chance. One can track the futures mkts in currencies easily enough as to who has bought or sold X amount, but there is NO -- say again NO -- way to track the action in the interbank (aka, ''spot'' and forward) mkts, on the single assumption that the bad guys aren't absolute morons when it comes down to finance. (They're obviously morons in other endeavours).
There are roughly 30 major banks and institutions which ''make'' the mkts in spot forex. The futures mkts constitute at best 5-7% of all the volume in forex, therefore you must go to the ''cash'' forex mkts who do the huge bulk of forex trading, these very same huge institutions (not all of them are banks in fact).
And you (or sundry gov'ts, no difference), should you ask them, will be told to go whistle and PUAR by Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Barclay's, any Swiss major, HSBC, Dai-Ichi (or its successor bank) et al. just who was trading what pair (spot currencies are always pairs, e.g. EUR/USD, GBP/JPY, etc.) and when, and which way, and how large.
If the raghead terrorists desired, as one would obviously assume they would do, to disguise their transactions, they'd simply open up a number of smallish/moderate-sized accounts in Cyprus, Malta, the Channel Islands, BWI, even still the Caymans, although the Caymans have gotten rather too high a profile these days for the sensible (pardon the oxymoron) terrorist to use for forex trading, and deal through whichever 2nd-tier bank's (or banks') correspondent relationship with Deutsche, Paribas, etc.
As long as the terrorists rotate the action around and do not concentrate it, the little red flags will NEVER pop up.
Pls note, I don't like writing this any more than you like reading this, but there's no point at all in deluding oneself, and the occurrence of this sort of account usage and manipulation is utterly inarguable.
Action in interbank forex is, fapp, untrackable, until and unless a gov't or group of gov'ts decide to coerce, say, Deutsche Bank or Barclay's into disclosing their trading records.
At the moment, the unfortunate but accurate way to wager on THIS little proposition is:
''Rotsa Ruck''.
btt
Even if it could be determined, that a currency was "in play," it really wouldn't provide much in the way of a clue as to where to expect an attack. And if the currency was the USD or the Euro, it would basically be impossible (for that matter I can't really see how an attack on America would really affect the US dollar). From what I can see on this table, 9/11 had no affect whatsoever on the value of the dollar vs. the Euro.
http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory
And, btw, that oanda site you posted is absolutely excellent for studying histories on ccy pairs other than those traded in Chicago on CME/IMM.
Frankly, I think (as do my assorted forex gurus) that this imputation that GBP was the 'victim' of a short play by al-Qaida is purely nonsense.
However, in trading, it never pays to disabuse a trader who trades according to an outright delusion -- so, let's let 'em go ahead and sell GBP down another 5-6-8 handles, eh?
/evilgrin
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