# Unusual 'put option' trading on airline and insurance stocks before September 11 proves that insiders had foreknowledge of the attacks

**Verdict: Contradicted.** There was genuinely elevated put-option activity before 9/11, most famously on United Airlines and American Airlines, and an academic study confirmed the put volume was statistically unusual. But 'unusual' is not 'informed.' The SEC ran an exhaustive review and the 9/11 Commission examined the trades: each traced to an innocent cause. The largest block of UAL puts was bought by a US institutional investor with no conceivable al-Qaeda tie, as part of a strategy that also bought calls and shares inconsistent with attack foreknowledge; much of the AMR activity followed an options-newsletter recommendation. No trade was ever linked to the plotters. The claim that the trading proves foreknowledge is rated debunked.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: 2000s · First circulated: 2001 · Believed by: The 'put options' story is one of the most durable single strands of 9/11 suspicion, cited across the Truth movement and repeated in mainstream-adjacent coverage in the weeks after the attacks. It endures partly because the underlying anomaly is real and easy to state, and partly because a 2009 revelation that the SEC had destroyed its working files fed a sense that something had been hidden.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/9-11-put-options

## Summary
In the days before 11 September 2001, traders bought an unusually large number of 'put options', bets that a stock will fall, on the parent companies of United Airlines and American Airlines, and on other firms that the attacks would hammer. When the stocks duly crashed, some of those positions became very valuable. To many observers this looked like proof that someone, insiders or an intelligence agency, knew what was coming and cashed in. This case file keeps two things apart: yes, put volume really was elevated, and an academic study found it statistically notable; and the claim it rates, that this proves criminal foreknowledge. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated every suspicious trade, the 9/11 Commission summarized the results, and each one traced to an ordinary, lawful explanation with no link to the hijackers or their backers. Unusual volume, it turns out, is weak evidence of anything, and this file explains why.

## The claim
That the spike in put-option purchases on airline stocks (notably United Airlines/UAL and American Airlines/AMR) and on firms such as Morgan Stanley in the days before September 11 was too large and too well-targeted to be coincidence, and therefore proves that people with advance knowledge of the attacks, whether al-Qaeda associates, complicit insiders, or an intelligence service, traded on that knowledge for profit.

## Origin and timeline
- 2001-09-06: Five trading days before the attacks, the volume of put options on UAL Corporation, parent of United Airlines, surges far above its normal level on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. United 175 and United 93 will be hijacked on 11 September.
- 2001-09-10: The day before the attacks, put-option volume on AMR Corporation, parent of American Airlines, spikes sharply. American 11 and American 77 will be hijacked the next morning.
- 2001-09-11: Al-Qaeda hijackers fly four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. When markets reopen on 17 September, airline and insurance stocks fall steeply, and the earlier put positions become sharply more valuable, on paper the exact profile foreknowledge would produce.
- 2001-09: Within days, press outlets in the US and abroad report 'suspicious' or 'insider' trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission opens a review and enlists the FBI, options exchanges, and foreign regulators; the story of the '9/11 put options' is born almost immediately.
- 2002: The SEC's review concludes without finding foreknowledge. Regulators state that although some trading was unusual, each notable position traced to an innocent explanation and none was tied to anyone with advance knowledge of the plot.
- 2004-07: The 9/11 Commission's final report addresses the trades directly. A now much-cited footnote in Chapter 5 (note 130) explains that a single US institutional investor with no conceivable al-Qaeda link bought 95 percent of the pre-attack UAL puts as part of a broader strategy, and that much of the AMR activity followed a specific options-trading newsletter.
- 2006: Finance scholar Allen M. Poteshman publishes 'Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001' in The Journal of Business. Comparing pre-attack volume to historical benchmarks, he finds the put activity in the airlines statistically unusual, but reaches no conclusion that it reflected informed trading, and notes the pattern is consistent with ordinary speculation.
- 2009-2010: A researcher's Freedom of Information Act request for the documents behind the Commission's footnote 130 draws an SEC reply that the working records had been destroyed under a routine retention schedule. Truth-movement writers treat this as a cover-up; skeptics note that a summary conclusion survived and that routine destruction of investigative work-papers is common. New papers by conspiracy-aligned authors claim to find 'informed trades', which mainstream reviewers do not accept.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Put volume on UAL and AMR before 9/11 was extraordinary, many times normal levels. Bets that precisely those airlines would crash, placed in precisely those days, cannot be coincidence.
  Evidence: The elevated volume is real, and this is the claim's strongest factual footing. But a large, targeted position is only suspicious if there is no ordinary reason for it, and here there was. The 9/11 Commission found that a single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable tie to al-Qaeda bought about 95 percent of the pre-attack UAL puts on September 6, and did so as part of a hedging and directional strategy that also included buying call options and shares, positions that would lose money if the airlines fell. Someone with foreknowledge of the attacks would not hedge the bet with calls; the mixed book is the fingerprint of an ordinary trader, not a plotter. Much of the September 10 AMR activity, in turn, was traced to a US options-trading newsletter that had recommended those exact trades to subscribers days earlier. A bet can be large, well-timed, and profitable, and still be innocent.
- Claim: An academic study proved the trading was 'unusual', which confirms the insider-trading thesis.
  Evidence: The study exists and is often cited, but it does not say what the claim implies. Allen Poteshman's 2006 paper in The Journal of Business compared pre-9/11 option volume to long-run historical distributions and found the put activity in the airlines statistically high relative to that benchmark. 'Statistically unusual' means only that the volume sat in the tail of the normal range, not that any particular trader knew anything. Poteshman drew no conclusion of informed trading and observed the pattern was consistent with ordinary market activity. Volume this side of a benchmark happens routinely for mundane reasons: a newsletter tip, an earnings scare, a hedging program, sector news. Treating a tail observation as proof of a specific crime confuses a statistical flag with a verdict.
- Claim: Morgan Stanley, a WTC tenant, and reinsurers that would pay out billions also saw suspicious option activity, widening the circle of foreknowledge.
  Evidence: These names come up alongside the airlines, and the reviews covered them too. The SEC and its partners examined trading across the airlines, insurers, reinsurers, and financial firms exposed to the attacks. In each case the pattern of apparently well-timed positions dissolved on inspection into ordinary trading: pre-existing hedges, positions opened before any plausible tip window, or volume that was elevated but explicable. No firm's option activity was ever connected to a person with advance knowledge of the attacks. The breadth of the review is part of the answer: regulators did not check one stock, they swept the whole affected market and still found no informed trade.
- Claim: The SEC later admitted it destroyed the documents behind the 9/11 Commission's footnote, which proves the innocent explanation was a cover story.
  Evidence: The document-destruction episode is real and is the claim's most rhetorically effective point, but it does not carry the weight placed on it. In response to a records request years later, the SEC said the underlying working files behind footnote 130 had been destroyed under a routine retention schedule. Routine destruction of investigative work-papers after a case closes is ordinary agency practice and is not, by itself, evidence of concealment; the Commission's and SEC's conclusions were published and survive. The gap it leaves is genuine (outside researchers cannot now re-audit the raw trade-by-trade files), and that is a fair criticism of records management. It is not proof that a suppressed finding of foreknowledge ever existed. Absence of the paperwork is not presence of a crime.

## Why people believe it
- The anomaly is real and the story is short. Unlike claims that require elaborate diagrams, this one fits in a sentence: they bet the airlines would crash days before the airlines crashed. A true, striking, easily repeated fact sits at the center, and the leap from 'unusual volume' to 'foreknowledge' feels like common sense until the trade details are examined.
- Money makes motive legible. A hidden plot is abstract, but someone quietly getting rich off mass murder is a villain the mind can picture. The put-options story supplies a concrete, greedy human motive and an apparent paper trail, which feels more tangible than arguments about steel temperatures or collapse physics.
- Financial markets are genuinely opaque to most people. Options, hedging, and short selling are unfamiliar and faintly sinister to a general audience, so an expert-sounding claim about 'put volume ratios' is hard to check and easy to accept. The very complexity that lets skeptics explain the trades also lets proponents assert whatever they like about them.
- The destroyed-documents revelation looked like a smoking gun. When the SEC said the files behind the key footnote were gone, it confirmed a prior suspicion for many: that the innocent explanation was never meant to be verified. A real bureaucratic act (routine records destruction) was read backward into the narrative as proof of a cover-up.
- It travels with the larger 9/11 story. The put-options claim rarely stands alone; it rides alongside the controlled-demolition and 'inside job' theories, borrowing their momentum. Once someone doubts the official account of the day, a tidy financial motive slots neatly into the frame they already hold.

## Open questions
- Why did the SEC destroy the working files behind footnote 130? The routine-retention explanation is plausible and common, but it does mean the raw, trade-by-trade evidence that supported the Commission's summary can no longer be independently re-audited. That is a legitimate transparency criticism, distinct from any claim that the destroyed files would have shown foreknowledge.
- Was every affected security examined with equal rigor? The reviews were broad, but proponents argue that some names (certain reinsurers, or trades routed through overseas accounts) got less public accounting than the airlines. What was published is a summary; the exhaustive underlying casework was never released in full, which leaves room to ask how completely the tail cases were run down.
- How should regulators treat 'statistically unusual' volume going forward? Poteshman's work showed the pre-9/11 put activity really did sit in the tail of the historical range, yet had innocent causes. The open methodological question is how markets and watchdogs can flag genuinely informed trading without mistaking every unusual-but-innocent spike for a crime, a problem that reaches well beyond 9/11.

## Sources
- The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (see Chapter 5 and note 130 on pre-9/11 trading), U.S. Government Publishing Office (GovInfo) (2004): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-911REPORT/pdf/GPO-911REPORT.pdf
- Were Stocks of Airlines Suspiciously Shorted Just Before 9/11?, Snopes (2015): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/put-paid/
- Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, Allen M. Poteshman, The Journal of Business, Vol. 79, No. 4 (via JSTOR) (2006): https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503645
- Unusual Options Market Activity with an Application to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (working paper), Allen M. Poteshman (SSRN) (2004): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=370741
- Document Friday: 'Terrorist-Insider-Trading?' The SEC's Pre-September 11, 2001 Trading Review, Unredacted (National Security Archive) (2010): https://unredacted.com/2010/04/30/document-friday-terrorist-insider-trading-the-secs-pre-september-11-2001-trading-review/
- September 11 attacks advance-knowledge conspiracy theories, Wikipedia (2024): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-knowledge_conspiracy_theories
- Was there insider trading before September 11?, SimTrade blog (financial-markets educational resource) (2021): https://www.simtrade.fr/blog_simtrade/insider-trading-before-september-11/

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