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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (67558)	1/21/2003 11:32:48 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi all; The TradeSports trading data is particularly interesting in and around November 9, 2002, the date that the UN security council resolution on Iraq was passed. There was a NY Times article (Stocks Bullish in Iraq Market; Don't Ask Why, John F. Burns, NY Times, December 18, 2002) to the effect that this resolution caused the Iraqi stock market to rise and that this therefore implied that the Iraqis were looking forward to a war. I critiqued this article as follows: Bilow, January 4, 2003 ... From the above chart, it is clear that the UN resolution itself produced no net war fears, nor did it have any significant effects on the world financial markets. If anything, this shows that the resolution itself was rather innocuous. Indeed, Gold went slightly down over the very weekend that the UN resolution was supposedly going to make Saddam's violent ouster more likely. But that following week did see some action in gold due to war fears. On Tuesday, November 12th, Iraq's parliament rejected resolution 1441. This caused gold to rise reaching a peak the next day. But on the 14th, Iraq accepted inspections and gold dropped again: ... In other words, the financial record indicates that the UN resolution was not interpreted by the financial markets as one that made war more likely with Iraq. Instead, the resolution was treated as a close to neutral event, while there definitely were reactions to the moves by Iraq's parliament and to Saddam's acceptance of resolution 1441. #reply-18400180 Now that I have direct trading data for a war fear indicator, it makes sense to go back and see how this indicator traded around that time. It's difficult to tell exactly which dates correspond to exactly which prices, but as best I can make out, while there was a bump just after the UN security resolution passed, by two days later the contract was making new lows (i.e. the probability of war went down). Here's the figures for the June 30 expiration, the March 31st expiration looks to be fairly similar: Expiration Date 06/30 -------- ----- 02/11/01 58 02/11/02 59 02/11/03 58 02/11/04 59 02/11/05 58 02/11/06 52 02/11/07 46 02/11/08 47 02/11/09 48 02/11/10 54 02/11/11 48 02/11/12 44 02/11/13 42 02/11/14 43 02/11/15 40 -- Carl P.S. Note that the above figures will not exactly match the weekly figures I took off of the graphs because these were done more carefully (in terms of picking off the correct date) and are likely more accurate.

To: Bilow who wrote (67558)	1/28/2003 5:11:40 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi all; Update to tradesports data on betting on Saddam: Expiration Date 03/31 06/30 -------- ----- ----- 02/09/24 60 82 02/10/01 61 76 02/10/08 60 75 02/10/15 53 70 02/10/22 52 68 02/10/29 47 62 02/11/05 42 59 02/11/12 40 51 02/11/19 27 40 02/11/26 30 39 02/12/01 29 38 02/12/08 33 47 02/12/15 32 46 02/12/22 44 59 02/12/29 45 58 03/01/05 41 59 03/01/12 31 51 03/01/19 38 57 03/01/27 32 59 -- Carl