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BUSH UNDER SPECULATIVE ATTACK
President Bush's enemies have found a new way to attack him -- through the online financial markets. There have now been four separate "speculative attacks" on the market in futures contracts on Bush's re-election probabilities traded online at the Dublin-based website Tradesports.com. These futures are real-money "bets" placed by thousands of traders around the world on whether George Bush will be re-elected. For the last several months the futures have been a reliable leading indicator of where conventional polls are heading, and they've received increasing mainstream media attention.The attacks involved massive sell orders placed by a single individual -- the same individual all four times -- according to a spokesman for Tradesports. Each attack caused a massive temporary drop in the price of the Bush re-election futures. The most recent one, last Friday at about 1:30 EDT, whacked the Bush futures from a price of 54 (indicating the market's estimate of a 54% probability of Bush's re-election) all the way down to a price of 10 (indicating a 10% probability) -- in just eight minutes. Six minutes later the futures were back to 54. That's the equivalent of an 8000-point crash in the Dow Jones Industrial Average -- followed by an 8000 point recovery, all within 14 minutes. What could be the attacker's motive? Obviously, it can't have been to maximize profits. Even if Bush loses the election and the futures position pays off, the attacked would make more money by being patient and selling at 54 instead of 10. In fact, when the futures snapped back to 54 when he was done selling, every contract he'd sold at 10 showed an immediate 44 point loss. Posted by: tipper 2004-10-19 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=46395 |