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Notes -
Austin Private Wealth is the group in question, they're a fee-only fiduciary with just over $1B in assets managed. Their filing on Friday 7/12 listed 12,000 puts on $DJT. They put out a statement saying a third-party vendor caused all of their options positions to be multiplied by 10,000, and so the actual position was 12 puts. I don't know enough about the workings of actual investing groups to speak here with any definitiveness, but it seems unusual to me that they would buy 12 puts--assuming a $1 premium, that's $1200. That's nothing compared to their total holdings. Maybe there's a diversified spread and they had like $50,000 or $100,000 of puts, and I'm sure that'll come out if they did. Or maybe it was a hedging move if they have 1200 shares of $DJT, but I think they'd have probably included in their statement if they had such stock. "We didn't have this large short, in fact we hold $DJT." Simple.
But that also ignores a worse question, from my cursory research their holdings would be reported under SEC Form 13F. Maybe this is wrong, if it is the following can be crossed out, but if that's true: multiple people from APW should have, and possibly would have needed to sign off on it prior to its approval, so did they all fail obscenely in their fiduciary duty? Or did they fail it by only one person being charged with verifying and then approving. If the financial guy doesn't notice a position worth $1200 has been marked as $1.2 million, should he keep managing your money? Now multiply that by as many options positions as they had. It's insane. They should absolutely be investigated if for no other reason than the claimed lapse in duty, unless it's a regular thing for investment groups to give astronomically wrong filings to the SEC. But there is presumably a lengthy paper trail here, so if they're lying and they did have a 1.2 million share short, I assume it's a matter of time before someone with the proper finance bona fides uncovers what happened.
All this meaning: if APW did in fact have a 12,000 put position, then that combined with their statement now denying it and their attempted obfuscation, is clear evidence of conspiracy.
As for #3, sure, all plausible. #4 yeah remains to be seen. I don't think I emphasized enough, but that is the question above all other questions. When did they know? If people go to prison over this, it will be on that question. The CBS report says at 5:51 they had a suspicious person with a rangefinder, that's enough for me to say someone had a failure in duty worthy of prison. But that's criminal negligence, for failure to protect the President and the people around him, the death of Compertore. Whether it was malicious aforethought is the deeper question, and one that, again, remains to be seen.
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