It’s a desirable story in the midst of the general tragedy and dark carnage of the past two months. Two researchers analyzed the industry in the days leading up to the Oct. 7 massacres in southern Israel and made a pretty strong argument that necessarily short-circuited the Israeli economy relied on the prior wisdom of the attacks. Specifically, they tracked the short-term promotion of a foreign exchange industry fund, which presented investors with broad exposure to the Israeli economy.
I’m far from an expert on this topic of this kind of analysis. So perhaps someone with greater technical knowledge could find gaps in the argument. But it seems pretty convincing: short-selling just in advance of October 7th that greatly exceeded what had been seen during various crises over the last twenty years — COVID, the great recession, various Israeli wars and domestic crises. If you’re a Haaretz subscriber they have a detailed write-up here. You can also read the paper published at SSRN here.
As we learned recently, Israel had a decent amount of complex intelligence on an attack similar to the one on October 7. Most of this intelligence was ignored because it believed that Hamas did not have the capability to launch an attack of this magnitude and also because it was widely believed that Hamas hoped for a prolonged era of “calm” with Israel. But the precise date of the plans would have been a closely guarded secret. It is very likely that the transactions were carried out through someone with extensive knowledge of Hamas’ plans.
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