https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018c-30d8-dc03-a9ec-3cfb40060000/6c/97/de578d544e36ab79023fed36b3f4/ssrn-id4652027.pdfTrading on Terror? published 3 December 2023
Robert J. Jackson, Jr.*
Nathalie P. Urry Professor of Law. New York University
Joshua Mitts, David J. Greenwald Professor of Law, Columbia University
This is something I know next to nothing about . . . the financial market, trading, short selling, exchange traded funds . . . however the "follow the money" concept is familiar and always telling. It is a very long article. A paper, actually.
It seems a bit suspicious because it is made to look as if it is coming from the Israeli paper Haaretz. It is in fact "haarets". Actual Haaretz is a dot com, not dot il. However, as it turns out haarets.co.il actually is part of Haaretz . . . looking it up it connects to haaretz.co.il which is the Hebrew edition. The dot com is the English version. Anyway, the point is that it seems a misleading addressess, but may not be.
It would require a lot of research to check all the information . . . or knowledge which some folks probably already have, to understand what is being said.
However, it seems like it is saying the trend suggests the 7 October attack was not a surprise.
And of course that raises questions at a level people do not want to discuss. Even so, that is the reality of it.
Abstract
"Recent scholarship shows that informed traders increasingly disguise trades in economically linked securities such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Linking that work to longstanding literature o financial markets’ reactions to military conflict, we document a significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company ETF days before the October 7 Hamas attack. The short selling that day far exceeded the short selling that occurred during numerous other periods of crisis, including the recession following the financial crisis, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv. For one Israeli company alone, 4.43 million new shares sold short over the September 14 to October 5 period yielded profits (or approximates avoided losses) of 3.2 billion NIS on that additional short selling. Although we see no aggregate increase in shorting of Israeli companies on U.S. exchanges, we do identify a sharp and unusual increase, just before the attacks, in trading in risky short-dated options on these companies expiring just after the attacks.
We identify similar patterns in the Israeli ETF at times when it was reported that Hamas was
planning to execute a similar attack as in October. Our findings suggest that traders informed
about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events, and consistent with prior literature we show that trading of this kind occurs in gaps in U.S. and international enforcement of legal
prohibitions on informed trading. We contribute to the growing literature on trading related to
geopolitical events and offer suggestions for policymakers concerned about profitable trading on the basis of information about coming military conflict."
https://img.haarets.co.il/bs/0000018c-30d8-dc03-a9ec-3cfb40060000/6c/97/de578d544e36ab79023fed36b3f4/ssrn-id4652027.pdf