Authorities in Israel are investigating claims made by U.S. researchers that merchants put outsize brief positions on Israeli shares and an exchange-traded fund forward of the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas, Reuters reported Monday.
The Israel Securities Authority mentioned the matter “is known to the authority and is under investigation by all the relevant parties,” in response to Reuters.
Researchers examined buying and selling in exchange-traded funds that put money into Israeli corporations, in addition to short-selling exercise on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and choices exercise round Israeli corporations traded on U.S. exchanges.
“Taken together, our evidence is consistent with informed traders anticipating and profiting from the Hamas attack,” wrote legislation professors Robert J. Jackson, Jr., of New York University and Joshua Mitts of Columbia University in a paper printed on Monday. The authors emphasised the “preliminary nature” of the paper.
Citing an Oct. 2 spike in brief curiosity within the iShares MSCI Israel Exchange Traded Fund
EIS,
which tracks a broad-based index of Israeli corporations, the authors mentioned that “traders appeared to anticipate the events to come.”
The paper additionally mentioned that 4.43 million new shares of Bank Leumi
LUMI,
Israel’s largest financial institution, had been bought brief between Sept. 14 to Oct. 5. The authors revised the paper after an Israeli news report mentioned the preliminary estimate of income round Leumi brief commerce had been inflated as a result of an error round how shares are quoted.
The authors additionally discovered a rise in short-dated choices contracts on shares of Israeli corporations traded on U.S. exchanges expiring on Oct. 13 relative to choices expiring later within the yr.
“We show that this increase in short-dated options can be linked to several block trades in options written on Israeli companies in U.S. markets, suggesting that a small number of actors may have been behind this options trading,” they wrote.
Source web site: www.marketwatch.com
