Posted on 12/06/2023 4:19:36 PM PST by Angelino97
Five days before the deadliest attack in Israel's history, a warning may have appeared on stock exchanges.
A study by researchers from Columbia University and NYU called "Trading on Terror?" suggests that a trader may have been aware of the coming attack, bet against the Israeli economy and walked away with a profit by short selling on the U.S. and Israeli stock exchanges.
Short selling is a trading strategy aimed at making a profit off an asset that is expected to drop in price; the seller "borrows" a security and sells it on the open market with the goal of buying it back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference.
The study looked at the Israel Exchange-Traded Fund, a common way for people to make investments in Israel, which on any given day has around 2,000 shares shorted. According to the researchers, on Oct. 2, that number shot up to over 227,000 shares.
According to Columbia Law School Professor Joshua Mitts, one of the authors of the study, "that's extremely unusual." It was also profitable: the shares sold short for one Israeli company alone yielded a profit of "millions" of Israeli shekels.
The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange on Tuesday denied that any investors profited by having advance knowledge of the Oct. 7 attack and said the Columbia study is flawed, Reuters reported. Yaniv Pagot, head of trading at the exchange, said the researchers miscalculated the profits short-sellers earned in the months leading up to the attack, according to the wire service.
"I don't see in the data something even close to what they wrote in the paper," Pagot told Reuters. "There was nothing unusual in short positions in the stock exchange in the two months before the attack."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Soros? Signature move, for him.
“suggests that a trader may have been aware of the coming attack”
If they can only point to one trader being involved, it doesn’t seem like a good case, since you might concievably find one trader taking any unusual position you could think of at any time. However, if they found 100 traders doing some coordinated short-selling, then I think the case that they had some insider knowledge would get a lot stronger.
Probably the same people who took out massive short positions just prior to 9/11.
Kind of like 9/11?
thousands of terrorists knew about it in advance. Certainly thousands more that supported and help facilitate the attack knew. Dozens of embedded journalists knew in advance. Egypt knew in advance.
The only ones that were clueless about the impending attack coming our from the 25 mile fenced in area was the Mister Magoo government of Israel and their Mossad.
Can anyone explain short selling?
I’ve never fully understood how it works.
Yeah this has the stench of Soros all over it
You mean like cattle futures? Hillary is that you?
SS1
(Study: Someone bet against the Israeli stock market in the days before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack)
Check Bill Gates, George Soros and Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama.
Maybe a time traveler. Have to be a little circumspect about winning every sports bet and being right all the time.
György Schwartz.
Gotta be Pelosi’s trader.
I agree. A one-off is an outlier; a multitude suggests coordination, perhaps even a conspiracy.
In a nutshell, within a time frame, you put an auto-bid on stocks that you believe are due for a correction. If you are right, you will make money between their low point and recovery point.
However, the risk is that the stock doesn’t correct, at least within the time frame you set your bid at, and you could take a wash because you are forced to buy a stock at a higher point than you wanted to pay.
The act of trading stocks or commodities in a way to make money if the stock or commodity goes down in value...
zactly
Basically, you borrow a stock (like from a broker), and you sell it. You agree, at a fixed point in a future to buy it back and return it to the person you borrowed it from. You are betting that the stock will be lower than the price that you sell it for today, and you get to keep the profit. You borrow 100 shares of XYZ company and sell them today for $50. You now have $5000. if the stock falls to $20, you buy the stock back for $2000 and pocket the $3000 profit. BUT, if the stock rises, you can lose money. Because there is no limit on how high a stock can go up, there is really no limit on how much you can lose. It is a risky proposition and I wouldn’t recommend it. In extreme situations, where there are limited stocks available to be purchased, the price can skyrocket as the investors with short positions try to cover their shorts. This is known as a short squeeze. Not for the faint of heart.
Prior to October 7, Israel was approaching a civil war, with prominent political actors urging violence and military mutiny, with secular tech moguls looking to move money out of Israel. If that’s not a reason to short sell, nothing is.
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