Billionaire investor George Soros bet millions of dollars that MGM Resorts International would experience a downturn in the months before the Las Vegas shooting.

According to SEC filings from mid August, Soros purchased $42 million dollars worth of puts on the booming business industry, which indicates that he expected a market downturn for some reason and he anticipated making a lot of money off of it.

Soros, noted for his support of leftist activism and support for radical leftist politicians, stood to make a killing off of a drop in the market price of resort shares. But he wasn’t the only one betting big that something bad was coming.

Even more suspicious, MGM’s CEO, James Murren, coolly divested himself of 80% of the shares he owned in his own company in the days before the ex-dividend date on September 8th, 2017. These actions were surprising at the time because his resorts shares were doing quite well, especially in light of the fact that on Tuesday, September 5th, 2017, the board of MGM Resorts International decided to approve a $1 billion share repurchase program. At $17.7 billion today, the program represented a significant portion of its then market cap.

This meant that the CEO made a tidy profit, but that he also got out before the shares fell. The sales were originally disclosed in a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Murren had previously divested 57,269 shares on July 31st and August 9th, 2017, during the same time period that Soros was placing his put options.

The Las Vegas attack on Sunday, October 1st, caused shares of casino operators to fall the following Monday. MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay hotel near where the shooting occurred, fell 5.6 percent that day. Other resorts also slipped, though not by the same amount as Wynn Resorts slipped 1.2 percent. Las Vegas Sands fell as much as 2.1 percent before closing higher.

Analysts with investment bank Morgan Stanley forecast the shooting will decrease demand for the Las Vegas market for about six months and have a 4 percent to 6 percent economic effect, which is not huge in the long run, but when tens of millions of dollars are changing hands, those kind of numbers mean a lot of money to winners.

No one knows what compelled Murren to sell, sell, sell, but the actions don’t really make any sense in context. Why would any profit-oriented CEO of any company sell 80% of his personal stake in his own corporation, especially after he thought it was in the business’ best interest to initiate a massive share repurchase program which one would theoretically assume to reduce the number of shares in the company and increase the price of each share. Also, why would the individual with the most information about the company sell 80% of his shares immediately after the commencement of a program that most would consider positive for the stock? Shouldn’t he want to hold on to his shares? Is there something he knew, that others didn’t, that lead to so much movement in such little time? And did Soros know something no one else knew as well?

Via: WFP