MKW

Goldman's Programmed Trading Is Back with a Vengeance

Interesting the end-of-day stick-save attempt failed this afternoon. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

IBM's Gerstner Favors Taxing Short Term Capital Gains

The frequent mini-stick-saves on SPY yesterday positively reeked of "A Certain Large Bank's" shenanigans. Note how amid all this "bullish action", SPY basically didn't go up unless it shot up more than one point in a tick on a surge to at least half a million shares traded in that minute.

U.S. Market (Lack of) Action Charts

Now isn't that interesting. The day after it becomes official that JPM can pay back TARP, the market action is totally different - among other things, it's 1:30 and I haven't yet seen a great blast up in the markets on a volume surge in SPY. The market is actually being allowed to go down! Amazing, and what a coincidence!

The Rally That Won't Die

Yep... that's the question all right.


On May 21 07:47 AM Silock wrote:

> Why even bother being in the market at all if that's your outlook?
>

The Rally That Won't Die

Buyer exhaustion should have set in a few weeks ago, but my bet is that this market is going to be a bit more insidious than you think. My bet is that the market finally drops - starting with a day down 300ish like you said - and then takes a retracement to one of the standard Fibbonacci levels. After that, it'll come back up, probably just as violently, sucker still more people in because they'll take that as confirmation of the new bull, maybe go as high as S&P 1000, THEN it'll crash to test the lows/break to new lows. I suggest this because it's the most insidious thing I could think of the market to do, and the way it's been behaving lately, expecting the worst is the best course of action.

The Calm Before the Storm?

Something is up. The fact that any of the major indicies spent any of today (after the opening three minute volatility hairball) with less than a 2% loss has me absolutely gobsmacked - and BKX has spent a good part of the day with less than 2% loss! But then, here's something else interesting - the low on the VIX since Tuesday open has been 32.45, and yet, give me a major index and it's probably somewhere between basically flat and down only 1.5% since. With that kind of VIX, the market should be dynamiting new craters in the ground by the hour. Even BKX is down less than 4% in that time - and WaMu finally imploded, among other things. This does not compute.

I think Felix may have a point; however I'd like to add a fourth possibility: Since everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) expects a crash, there might be no one left to sell to foment a crash.