[rossdavidh]

It does look interesting, but the fact that it was not even the highest spike in the previous 52 weeks, much less of any longer time period, makes it a lot less impressive than it sounds at first.

Now, I know of no reason why Hamas, Iran, or Russian sources that knew something was about to go off, would not have tried to profit from that (through proxies of one sort or another). But this doesn't quite seem unusual enough to act on. If this kind of spike triggered an alarm, it would have gone off a couple times in the previous 52 weeks alone, and any alarm that has that many false positives will get ignored eventually.

[DarknessFalls]

I'm not a professional trader by any means, but I would regard all of these spikes as important seismic activity. On the few occasions I've done options trading, I've looked at level 2 data for peaks just like this. It's just another data point meaning there might be significant movement, but nothing is certain. In this case, I would pull up the calendar of Jewish holidays. Is it nearly Passover - that holiday where the angel of Death went door-to-door? Well, that's a big indicator to me that there could be a terrorist event. The April spike definitely makes sense in that context, along with Egypt's warnings. Oct. 6th-8th is another holiday, not as big. Holidays mean people will be out celebrating in large groups.

All of it combined lends itself to algorithmic early detection systems. The general public should have this security. Not a sure thing, but neither is meteorology.