Put options surged 285x normal on airlines days before 9/11

Editorial: The Inconvenient Questions About Pre-9/11 Trading Patterns

On September 6, 2001, five days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, an unusual surge in put options appeared in the trading records of United Airlines. Someone purchased 4,744 puts—bets that the airline's stock would plummet. Three days later, on September 10th, American Airlines saw an even more dramatic spike: 4,516 put options traded, representing a 285-fold increase over the normal daily average. These weren't the trades of panicked investors responding to breaking news. They preceded the attacks by hours.

The question that followed was almost unavoidable: Did someone know what was coming? The allegation circulated immediately after 9/11, fueling suspicion that advance knowledge of the attacks had been exploited for financial gain. It seemed like the kind of detail that would demand comprehensive investigation—the sort of evidence that might point toward either catastrophic intelligence failures or something far more sinister.

But the official response was swift and dismissive. The SEC and FBI quickly closed the door on serious inquiry. They concluded that the surge in put options was coincidental, or at best represented standard hedging by institutional investors responding to general market anxiety. No charges were filed. No investor was identified publicly. The story, as far as official channels were concerned, was settled within weeks.

What complicates this neat conclusion is the documentation that did emerge. The commission investigating the trades traced 95 percent of the suspicious activity to a single investor—a figure described in official reports as having "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda." The specificity of that language is striking. If the trades were truly innocent, why mention al Qaeda connections at all? And why would an anonymous investor make such massive bets, only to vanish from public scrutiny once the attacks occurred?