The options you are talking about happened because they were publicly recommended by a tips sheet from a popular broker.
Now this is so patently false that it borders on gaslighting, and in turn casts doubt on the rest of your assertions and your intentions. The trading anomalies were so large and significant that foreknowledge of the attack was patently obvious, there were several news stories over the next few days and then all sorts of academic analysis over the next few years, all pointing in that same direction.
Now, even the news stories back then and the initial assumption was that it was Bin Laden himself that had placed those financial bets through shadow international holdings or somesuch, precisely to profit from the attacks (similar to today, think Israel affairs and Polymarket), and the SEC immediately -and understandably- put all its effort and focus on the investigation. When following the money led them not to Al Qaeda, but to US financial institutions with players having deep CIA connections, the investigation was stopped, all names were redacted, several typical “nothing to see here” statements were issued, evidence was blatantly and illegally destroyed by the SEC, and all subsequent reports always had the actual names of the people involved blacked-out.
You can read all about it here on this compilation from an amazing researcher, which means you’ll have dates, names and -most importantly- links to all primary sources of information (original news, SEC reports, etc) so you can dive deeper into any one of the relevant facts:
So it’s not opinion or truther/conspiracy bullshit, documented and historical facts point to some people connected with and also within the intelligence apparatus had foreknowledge on several aspects of the upcoming attacks: dates, airlines involved and apparently also one of the targets (the WTC).
About Casting, at least in the granddaddy of programming languages, C, just meant interpreting the value of a variable as if it was a different kind of variable. Important detail is that variables are actually just memory locations and the number of bytes that conform it. So if you have a variable x of type string that holds the letter A, and a variable y also of type string with the letter B, if you do
x+y
You get ‘AB’. But if you cast the variables like this:
(int)x + (int)y
You get 131
To put it in words as you asked, you are saying “please add the values located at memory locations x and y, but treat the values found there as if they were numbers, and not the ASCII codes for letters (which is what I had originally told you was there)”.
It’s been almost 30 years since the last time I actually used this, so I might be recalling something wrong.