September 11 · source record · paper

Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001

Allen M. Poteshman; The Journal of Business (University of Chicago Press) · 2006

AI-verified citationSRC-POTESHMAN-2006

identifier / locator: J. Bus. 79(4):1703–1726; DOI 10.1086/503645
url: https://doi.org/10.1086/503645
verification note: DOI and full bibliographic record confirmed via CrossRef 2026-08-26; complete abstract fetched and quoted verbatim from the RePEc/IDEAS record. Publisher full text is paywalled and was not obtained.
reliability notes: Peer-reviewed and methodologically explicit; its finding is a statistical characterization of order flow, which cannot identify a trader or a motive.
The paper's own conclusion is stated as consistency with informed trading, not as a demonstration of it — a distinction both sides of the public argument routinely drop.

Evidence drawn from this source

Supports· strongSEP-E020

what the source states: "Examination of the option trading leading up to September 11 reveals that there was an unusually high level of put buying. This finding is consistent with informed investors having traded options in advance of the attacks."
what we infer: Independent peer-reviewed confirmation that the anomaly is real as a statistical matter. Note the published claim's exact form: consistency with informed trading, which is not a demonstration of it and cannot identify a trader.
limitations: Verified from the abstract; the paywalled full text was not obtained, so no methodological detail is quoted.
Statistical abnormality cannot identify a trader or a motive.