Had a different topic in mind until I saw this:
Five days before the deadliest attack in Israel’s history, a warning may have appeared on stock exchanges.
A study by researchers from Columbia University and NYU called “Trading on Terror?” suggests that a trader may have been aware of the coming attack, bet against the Israeli economy and walked away with a profit by short selling on the U.S. and Israeli stock exchanges.
Short selling is a trading strategy aimed at making a profit off an asset that is expected to drop in price; the seller “borrows” a security and sells it on the open market with the goal of buying it back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference.
The study looked at the Israel Exchange-Traded Fund, a common way for people to make investments in Israel, which on any given day has around 2,000 shares shorted. On Oct. 2, that number shot up to over 227,000 shares.
According to Columbia Law School Professor Joshua Mitts, one of the authors of the study, “that’s extremely unusual.” It was also profitable: the shares sold short for one Israeli company alone yielded a profit of nearly $900,000.
Imagine, 1400 were killed, hundreds were kidnapped and women were assaulted and raped and babies beheaded and burned. That’s horrific enough even if you consider that you have a group of people who were since childhood taught that Jews were not due any consideration as human beings.
But the idea that there were people who KNEW this was coming and rather than doing something to prevent it decided it was an excellent chance to make a large profit. That brings obscenity to a whole new level.
Now in fairness the people who did this might well be the same as the folks who did the attacking, as Stephen Green put it:
Underground rocket factories don’t pay for themselves, you know.
So to them it might be the same ideology but for me this is so beyond the scope that it becomes very hard to see Christ in such people rather than recommend a generous use of hemp.
Closing thought: If I’m Israel from now on I’m monitoring stock markets for this type of activity in the future.
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