With the help of a well-connected friend, Hillary Rodham Clinton parlayed $1,000 into nearly $100,000 in the cattle futures market as her husband claimed the Arkansas governor's office.
She turned a $5,300 profit on her first trade.The White House released the figures Tuesday, along with 21 pages of supporting documents, trying to refute speculation that the first lady reaped windfall profits in 1978 and 1979 without investing any money of her own.
But the disclosures raised new questions. The most prominent: How did a novice investor profit a hundredfold in the volatile commodities market?
"It's been done, but it's one-in-a-thousand," said Jeffrey Piper, a broker with Lind-Waldock & Co. in Denver. "In fact, the odds are higher than that."
Several commodities brokers said Hillary Clinton's first venture into the market appeared to be unusually successful but that such profits were not unheard of at a time when cattle futures prices were in a record upswing because of reduced herds and inflation.
Hillary Clinton abruptly quit trading in 1980 after her daughter, Chelsea, was born. An aide said the first lady found the business "too nerve-racking. She just didn't have the stomach for it anymore."
Aides said Hillary Clinton never invested more than the $1,000, plus any profits she had accumulated. However, she, like other commodity futures traders, ran the risk of losing substantially more than her initial investment had the market moved against her.
Hillary Clinton made her first trade in October 1978, less than a month before the Arkansas governor's campaign. At that time, President Clinton was the state's attorney general.
White House officials said Hillary Clinton made the trades after consulting several people, including Jim Blair, a longtime Clinton friend and chief counsel for poultry giant Tysons Food Inc., an economic and political force in Arkansas.
Questions also were raised about the first lady's broker, Robert L. Bone, who had been disciplined by regulators both before and after her commodity trading. He was accused, among other things, of allocating trades to investors after he had determined whether the trades were winners or losers.
There is no evidence that Hillary Clinton benefited from allocation of profitable trades to her account.
"She had no knowledge of any allocation of trades," said one White House official.
Blair has said Hillary Clinton did not get special treatment in the investment.
The documents suggested that Hillary Clinton reinvested the principal and proceeds in several transactions, accumulating trading profits of $49,069 in 1978 against $22,548 in losses. Her net gain for 1978 was $26,521.
Letting her winnings ride, she made profits of $109,600 in 1979 and losses of $36,600. Her net gain for that year was $72,996. The White House indicated the difference came in the rounding off of figures.
She closed the account in July 1979 - after making more than $99,000 on the original $1,000.
In October 1979, Hillary Clinton opened a second account with $5,000 she had made in the initial investment, the documents suggested. In that account, she suffered a net trading loss of about $1,000; she closed the account in March 1980, shortly after Chelsea was born.