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To: John Pitera who wrote (2509)	10/21/2001 10:34:05 AM
From: Gone to Money Heaven	Respond to of 2850

Suspiciously timed bets against airlines expire today By Greg Farrell, USA TODAY 10/18/2001 - Updated 10:08 PM ET The Securities and Exchange Commission is stepping up its investigation of suspicious trading activity related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Thursday, the SEC distributed a watch list to all U.S. brokerage houses consisting of names supplied by the FBI and other law enforcement groups. It wants securities dealers to determine if they've done business with any individuals or groups on the list. The "control list" highlights the difficulty that the SEC has been having in its probe to find a possible link between known accomplices of Osama bin Laden and investors who profited last month by shorting the stocks of airlines, hotels and financial services companies. So far, no connection has been established. Although the SEC is investigating unusual activity in a basket of 38 stocks, the large number of "puts" purchased in American and United airlines just days before the attacks, which crashed American and United jets, has drawn the most attention. A put is essentially a bet that an underlying stock's price will fall. But while the puts appeared suspicious, they haven't yielded any conclusive evidence of a plot. Today, those puts expire. Here's what investigators know about them: • An institutional investor purchased 2,000 United puts on Sept. 6 through Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown. The puts remain open, suggesting that they were used to hedge an underlying stock position. • The puts in American Airlines were bought on the afternoon of Sept. 10 through National Financial Services, a division of Fidelity. Of 1,535 puts traded that day, 453 remain open. Prior to September, brokers in Chicago and New York noticed other unusual put trading. On Aug. 6, an investor bought 810 February puts in United stock. On July 12 and Aug. 3, investors bought more than 1,000 February puts in American. The February puts represented a bet that the stock of the two airlines would dip below $30 per share by the third Friday of February 2002. The Sept. 11 attacks knocked the stocks from about $30 to $18 when the market reopened Sept. 17. The October puts in both stocks, purchased for just over $500,000, were suddenly worth $4 million. Although institutional buyers may have decided that airline stocks were headed down, Chicago options traders are skeptical: If you're going to short the sector, you buy puts in the big three airlines, American, United and Delta. But there was no comparable activity in Delta stock. On the options exchange, where brokers are super-sensitive to any suggestion of insider trading, skepticism abounds. "It smells. It does not make sense to me," says one Chicago options trader

To: John Pitera who wrote (2509)	10/23/2001 9:20:09 AM
From: Gone to Money Heaven	Respond to of 2850

Web Sites Offer Varying Views Of Continuing Terrorism Story +By THOMAS E. WEBER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 22, 2001 LAST WEEK'S COLUMN looked at the risks of customized Web news -- specifically, the potential for individuals to set up filters that focus on narrow interests and preclude exposure to other views. Many readers wrote in to debate that issue, both pro and con. But a third group e-mailed me to say that, either way, they want to know how to stay better informed online. It's an understandable reaction. The thirst for information runs high these days, perhaps in some ways even higher than in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. Back then, the tragedy of the airliner attacks was a horrible, unfolding story that commanded attention everywhere. Now, with the appearance of anthrax in the U.S., people don't just want news. They also want information to protect themselves from dangers real and imagined. So here, then, are some tactics for using the Internet to keep well-informed. Just remember that almost anyone can produce a professional-looking Web site, making it important to evaluate sources for credibility. SHOP AROUND: One of the best aspects of online news is the ability to easily scan multiple sources. I recommend, of course, the online Journal. But keep in mind that different Web sites are updated according to different schedules as news comes in throughout the day. If you're keeping tabs online, it can be helpful to get a quick rotation going. I tend to flip between the sites of The Wall Street Journal and a few other major newspapers, with one or more of the major television networks thrown in for good measure. (If you're looking for links to news sites, Google provides an excellent list at www.google.com/news/.) SEARCH FAR: International sources are just as convenient as U.S. outlets online, and often represent illuminating alternatives. Not only are they gathering information with different priorities, but they also operate on different schedules because of time-zone differences. Surf the Web sites of European newspapers in the evening in the U.S., for instance, and you'll see tomorrow's front pages in Europe. Most accessible for U.S. readers are United Kingdom-based sites, including The Times of London (www.thetimes.co.uk), the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) and the BBC (news.bbc.co.uk). If you're fluent in other languages, you can range even wider. SEARCH NEAR: Don't forget about sites of local newspapers and television stations. The events of the post-Sept.11 era are simultaneously global and local, and hometown organizations often zoom in on smaller pieces of the story that don't command as much attention in the national press. Boston sites, for instance, have offered more coverage on security at Logan Airport, while other city sites have covered local arrests and investigations. FOLLOW LINKS: The Web's ability to provide material from original sources is a singular advantage. Especially with the bevy of health issues raised by the specter of bioterrorism, nonmedia sites provide fascinating reading. One example: public-health information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.bt.cdc.gov). You can scout for this kind of research yourself by typing appropriate words into your favorite search engine. But Yahoo does an excellent job of scouting out news-related links with its Full Coverage pages. Visit fullcoverage.yahoo.com and you'll find a list of current news topics. Clicking one summons a menu of wire-service stories, photos, video clips -- and hand-picked links to outside sources. LET OTHERS DECIDE: An alternative to scanning many sources yourself is to find someone who has already done the work. Matt Drudge may be a controversial figure in journalism because of the dispatches he writes himself, but his Drudge Report site (www.drudgereport.com), invariably finds and links to the hottest stories elsewhere on the Web. A typically exuberant example was Oct. 13, when Mr. Drudge linked to various anthrax scares around the U.S. with the headline "Chaos Night in USA." Another way to tap human filters is through weblogs, those link-filled diaries of personal commentary. Visit Blogger.com to browse some individual weblogs or Blogdex (blogdex.media.mit.edu) to find out the most common topics. One site that never fails to captivate me, especially lately, is MetaFilter (www.metafilter.com), a community weblog where members post provocative links and argue about them. Still another approach is to note which features are most popular among Web users. Yahoo's news section lists that stories have been e-mailed most frequently by visitors to their friends. And the Lycos 50, found at 50.lycos.com, shows which subjects come up most often in searches at the site. LET NEWS COME TO YOU: Rather than spending your time typing in Web addresses and waiting for pages to load, you can take advantage of a variety of services that will e-mail news updates to you. The Journal's online edition offers e-mail alerts for subscribers. Many other news sites offer news by e-mail in the form of daily digests or breaking-news flashes. In my experience testing different services, the timeliness of hot-news alerts can vary drastically. But if you have a wireless e-mail account -- and many people do now, through BlackBerry pagers or via Internet-enabled cellphones -- subscribing to news by e-mail can be a nice extra.