SRM₿ ☥

I was the main counterparty for airline puts before/during the 9/11 attacks (I was in the World Trade Center building for lunch the day before); they were buying puts in $UAL and American Airlines for weeks before the attacks. Brokers would call me and ask for a bid, I sold some, they seemed rich, then richer, then they just kept coming. When someone is buying a dollar bill for $1.01, you think, "sucker." When someone pays you $1.05 for a dollar, you think this is free money; when someone pays you $5 for $1, you bury your face in research, study the trade and you're very worried; when someone pays you $10 for $1, you know you're dead, but it just has not happened yet (and this is after I already got my ass kicked in Enron). The morning of 9/11, I would have blown out hard and would have had to fire about 60 or 70 people; the market didn't open, so that saved my firm. We didn't know there were 4 planes in the air, it could have been 4000 planes for all I knew so I told all of my traders to go home. My office was at the Cboe so I assumed it was also a target, and our lives were in danger. I was very worried that my NYC guys were dead (they were ok). I had no idea what to expect the next few days. When the market did open, I was down massively, but not blown out. The markets were so wide and the trading was so good we were net profitable by early November, a stunning turn of events. Stories about money feel gross when some people lost everything; I'm very sympathetic to the people who went through unimaginable hardship and I feel like me talking about trading is so small and petty in juxtaposition to the seriousness of true loss that many thousands of people experienced.