I recently posted an article from the National Review, which was an update from a previous article written 20 years ago — in 1995 — on the same subject: Hillary Clinton’s too-good-to-be-true commodity trading luck. The article provides an excellent analysis on all the things inconsistent with Hillary’s trade activity from the 1970s, documented the inconsistencies with Hillary’s explanations of how she seemingly got lucky, defied the odds, and made large sums of money.

Here’s a primer on commodity trading, and why Hillary Clinton’s trade deals are important for this election cycle. It’s very clear for anyone that Hillary really didn’t do any trading as she claimed; she allowed her broker to execute trades on her behalf.

With commodity trading: say you want 100 shares of X. You buy it with your trader, the trader goes down to the floor, does the transaction, it gets recorded under your name, and that’s that. So for instance, if you are buying futures — say 1000 head of cattle at a certain price — you are not actually buying the cattle, you are buying a future price. That means, you buy what you think the price will be at a certain point in time. With commodity trading you have the right to buy or sell these contracts, you have margins in which to operate,, and you can end up earning money or losing money if the price fluctuates widely.
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Now back in the day when Hillary was trading, the futures were often handled differently than they are currently. The brokers were so busy, they didn’t have the time or ability to record who did what in real-time like they do today; it was done after the market closed — but that’s also when a lot of buying and selling. happened. So Hillary Clinton’s broker, who had tied to Tyson Food and was a cattle producer could engage in beneficial trading; folks like him were always buying and selling futures because they were directly in the market.

The National Review article (Clinton’s Cattle Futures) is important because it provides a very detailed explanation of Hillary’s transactions. Hillary Clinton really wasn’t buying cattle; she was getting payoffs through her broker and who was just throwing profits into her account.

Three important points can be gleaned from the information. First, Hillary told everyone that anyone could have profited from the type of trading she (supposedly) did. But she really didn’t do the trading; in fact, it’s quite obvious that she didn’t even understand what kind of transactions were taking place. Most of her deals were actually downward movements when the market in general was going up, but she didn’t know that. It’s called trading on the short side — and no rational, inexperienced trader would know to or understand the thought of trading against the market trends, yet she did on several occasions, quite lucratively. Even today, she talks about riding a strong market, showing she doesn’t obviously understand that much of her profits were made by doing the exact opposite.

The second important point was the margin. Especially today, but even back then, no professional broker would allow you to execute a trade and any penny of movement that would make you lose thousands or cause your balance to be severely in the negative. For their own sake, they’d make sure you had collateral your account, and you need to have decent margin in case the cattle price changed 4-5 cents (which would translate into thousands). But Hillary Clinton regularly made trades with risks in the thousands, even if she only had hundreds in her account — and even negative on occasion. Hillary and Bill also lived on meager salaries with very little (if any) collateral. The fact that she was allowed to trade with consistently little-to-no margin is actually a violation of trade rules because it also puts the trader at risk — there’s no way any regular customer could do that.

3) The third salient point is in regard to the trading activity. There were a series of trades that she bought within 10% of the lowest price of the day, and when she sold, she sold within 10% of the highest price of the day. As any serious trader knows, there is no way anyone could consistently do that — unless there was help. If the broker was waiting at the end of the day, he could put the buys at below price and sells at the high price, so that she always made money; it is quite plausible this was the case, due to the record keeping methods and the name misspelling (HILARY) substantiate this.

It’s quite annoying to read the National Review article and consider how it squares up with the people who investigated Hillary’s trades at one point and declared there was no problem. Given what we know now, do these experts still think they were correct, or do they know they were bamboozled along with the rest of us.
There’s no possibility Hillary is telling the truth in this matter.