Is the stock market going to tank?

[WICS]

TBT because I think bonds are waaaay overbought and are the bubble everyone's been watching out for. Who knows?

Best of luck, all, and have a good weekend.

[LeeLau]

ho,y cow -BP CDS at 580? That's incredibly high. Too bad Markit doesn't publish numbers anymore

[Benny Profane]

ho,y cow -BP CDS at 580? That's incredibly high. Too bad Markit doesn't publish numbers anymore

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...WT.mc_ev=click

and it's still puking. Maybe a month it gets stopped. Maybe.

[Tap]

50 day simple MV is about to cross the 200, which is declining.

death cross!

[Ripzalot]

sell in may and go away.


it's summer folks!

[retirwntm]

ho,y cow -BP CDS at 580? That's incredibly high. Too bad Markit doesn't publish numbers anymore

lee,

did you see the ZH article about a "major credit event"? in it the BP spreads were inverted. its a pretty involved analysis, so i'd let it stand on its own, benny style:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gue...stating-lehman

[liv2ski]

lee,

did you see the ZH article about a "major credit event"? in it the BP spreads were inverted. its a pretty involved analysis, so i'd let it stand on its own, benny style:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/gue...stating-lehman

Beat you to the post on page 50. Great article that could definitely keep me awake at night if I wasn't drinking myself comatose these days

[Moeghoul]

low today...................9614.....have a happy 4th all!

[Moeghoul]

Sweet ride from 9614......McRALLLLLLLYYYY!!!! Any top callers? I think we break thru 11,000 on this run........

[Moeghoul]

PS. Anyone else like BP with the buyout rumors floating around? I picked up a little at 30, added some more today. If they can shut this well off with the cap, that might be an additional boost as well.

[liv2ski]

Sweet ride from 9614......McRALLLLLLLYYYY!!!! Any top callers? I think we break thru 11,000 on this run........

I had been waiting for the appropriate article to respond to your post.

"Remember how the market surged last week? One would think this may have been driven by something as fundamental as actual capital instead of HFT channel stuffing, frontrunning, and other no volume gimmicks, and that retail might actually be participating in a rally for once... One would be wrong. According to ICI even as the market was surging, once again - on no volume, it was merely an orchestrated means for mutual funds to sell out of stocks at slightly better prices to cover another week of massive outflows. In the week ended July 7, ICI reports that domestic equity mutual funds saw $4.1 billion in outflows, the largest outflow in the past 2 months, and the third biggest weekly redemption in 2010! This is also the tenth sequential outflow, amounts to $34 billion in total outflows YTD, and represents a losing streak even worse than that of the BDIY.... Yet stocks jumped. One day we hope congress will ask the Fed to explain this particular observation. And yes, in other lack of news, investors no longer trust stocks period: $6 billion in capital was allocated to taxable bond funds. Nobody cares about 10% returns with the possibility of a total wipe out. 4%, capital preservaton, and staying away from the corrupt and broken stock market is more than enough for most Americans nowadays".
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/ici...g-market-surge

The market melt up smells worse than a dead fish. Glad I sold and went away in May. You guys can invest in this Ponzi scheme.

PS. Anyone else like BP with the buyout rumors floating around? I picked up a little at 30, added some more today. If they can shut this well off with the cap, that might be an additional boost as well.

Things I will not ever buy: Financials, Tobacco or B fucking P. Even sales whores have to draw the line somewhere.

[Missing Sock]

The market melt up smells worse than a dead fish. Glad I sold and went away in May. You guys can invest in this Ponzi scheme.



Things I will not ever buy: Financials, Tobacco or B fucking P. Even sales whores have to draw the line somewhere.

You are putting way too much emphasis on weekly mutual fund flows. $4 billion is a drop in the bucket on more than $10 trillion in the U.S. mutual fund industry and a drop in a swimming pool to the $40 trillion or so U.S. asset management industry as a whole. and ohh yea, Equity mutual fund flows are still positive for the year while the S&P is down 2%......Besides, retail money is going to follow institutional money so by the time you see a real spike in retail mutual fund flows you are probably too late.

[liv2ski]

You are putting way too much emphasis on weekly mutual fund flows.

No emphasis. Just one more condition to report on the terminal US Economy.
IMO, it is a larger indicator that people are tapped out and likely liquidating their 401k accts to try and keep their heads above water for a little longer.
I mean there is so much bad news out there, I just need to stop parroting bits and pieces of it, as either you already see the bigger picture or you are just happy to float along downstream and drink the Kool Aid they are feeding you.

[Missing Sock]

No emphasis. Just one more condition to report on the terminal US Economy.
IMO, it is a larger indicator that people are tapped out and likely liquidating their 401k accts to try and keep their heads above water for a little longer.
I mean there is so much bad news out there, I just need to stop parroting bits and pieces of it, as either you already see the bigger picture or you are just happy to float along downstream and drink the Kool Aid they are feeding you.

What bad news isn't already priced into the market?

And the federal reserve flow of funds report indicates that household currency and deposit assets are higher than they were from any point during the '03-'07 bull market so it seems like the retail cash is there.

[4matic]

PS. Anyone else like BP with the buyout rumors floating around? I picked up a little at 30, added some more today. If they can shut this well off with the cap, that might be an additional boost as well.

Euro rally helps.. Capping the well may be a sell the news moment like the JPM earnings. (I'm long JPM...)

Expiration week pullback today. Next couple days and Monday very important to sustain a rally.

Finreg will be a sell the news moment also.

Technically we rallied to the base of the failure related to Flash Crash. This is an important juncture. A hard failure here is ominous..

[Moeghoul]

Euro rally helps.. Capping the well may be a sell the news moment like the JPM earnings. (I'm long JPM...)

Expiration week pullback today. Next couple days and Monday very important to sustain a rally.

Finreg will be a sell the news moment also.

Technically we rallied to the base of the failure related to Flash Crash. This is an important juncture. A hard failure here is ominous..

I still like BP here, entries at 30 and 35, trading over 37 today.
Finreg....looks like Wall Street likes it, meaning, it's biz as usual for the most part. Volker rule is in name only.

Benny and the Feds are preparing to launch the QE II as the "recovery" sputters. Barry O & Co. will prolly put pressure on the fed to add more supply as elections near, and there's still about 1/2 trillion left to blow from the Stimulus package.

Gold held up well bouncing off ~1190. Further USD weakness should bode well for another strike at its highs. USDX strong support around 81.

Earnings will prolly do better than expectations so with all that in mind, I'm still bullish into Aug/Sept. time frame.

RALLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!

[4matic]

PS. Anyone else like BP with the buyout rumors floating around? I picked up a little at 30, added some more today. If they can shut this well off with the cap, that might be an additional boost as well.

I still like BP here, entries at 30 and 35, trading over 37 today.
Finreg....looks like Wall Street likes it, meaning, it's biz as usual for the most part. Volker rule is in name only.

Benny and the Feds are preparing to launch the QE II as the "recovery" sputters. Barry O & Co. will prolly put pressure on the fed to add more supply as elections near, and there's still about 1/2 trillion left to blow from the Stimulus package.

Gold held up well bouncing off ~1190. Further USD weakness should bode well for another strike at its highs. USDX strong support around 81.

Earnings will prolly do better than expectations so with all that in mind, I'm still bullish into Aug/Sept. time frame.

RALLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!

No oil flowing in the gulf. Big rally on BP. Nice trade man. Book some profit.

[Lonnie]

No oil flowing in the gulf. Big rally on BP. Nice trade man. Book some profit.

Wow.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=bp

On a side note....

http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/15/news...pt=T1&iref=BN1

[Moeghoul]

RAALLLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

[grapedrink]

sweet they plugged the hole? that only leaves 100-300 million gallons of oil to clean up (exxon was 10-30).. jpmorgan made a bunch of money? well that should take care of deflation, double dip in housing, no jobs, european debt, chinese housing crash, etc.. buy buy buy buy buy buy!

THIS FUCKER'S GOIN' TO 20,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[WICS]

Ben just removed his rotorblade covers ...

Checking avionics and hydraulics ...

START button. Ka-BOOM!


—By the Dept. of Redundancy Department as well as France

[Benny Profane]

August 22, 2010
Stock Swing Still Baffles, With an Ominous Tone
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
It sounds like “Wall Street” meets “The X-Files.”

The stock market mysteriously plunges 600 points — and then, more mysteriously, recovers within minutes. Over the next few weeks, analysts at Nanex, an obscure data company in the suburbs of Chicago, examine trading charts from the day and are stunned to find some oddly compelling shapes and patterns in the data.

To the Nanex analysts, these are crop circles of the financial kind, containing clues to the mystery of what happened in the markets on May 6 and what might have caused the still-unexplained flash crash.

The charts — which are visual representations of bid prices, ask prices, order sizes and other trading activity — are inspiring many theories on Wall Street, some of them based on hard-nosed financial analysis and others of the black-helicopter variety.

To some people, like Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of Nanex, they suggest that the specialized computers responsible for so much of today’s stock trading simply overloaded the exchanges.

He and others are tempted to go further, hypothesizing that the bizarre patterns might have been the result of a Wall Street version of cyberwarfare. They say high-speed traders could have been trying to outwit one another’s computers with blizzards of buy and sell orders that were never meant to be filled. These superfast traders might even have been trying to clog exchanges to outflank other investors.

Jeffrey Donovan, a Nanex developer, first noticed the apparent anomalies. “Something is not right,” he said as he reviewed the charts.

Mr. Donovan, a man with a runaway chuckle who works alone out of the company’s office in Santa Barbara, Calif., poses a theory that a small group of high-frequency traders was trying to introduce delays into the nation’s fractured stock-market trading system to profit at the expense of others. Clogging exchanges or otherwise disrupting markets to gain an advantage may be illegal.

Mr. Donovan indulges Wall Street’s increasing fascination with the charts by christening more of them each day, with names like Continental Crust, Broken Highway and Twilight.

There is also the Bandsaw, a zigzag pattern of prices that appear and then abruptly vanish. There is the Knife, a sharp, narrowing price sequence. There is the Crystal Triangle, the Bar Code, the Mountain Range, each one stranger than the last.

The truth of what happened on May 6 could be hiding somewhere in those mysterious configurations. Or it may lie somewhere else entirely. But 15 weeks later, the authorities are still looking for it. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plan to issue a final report on their findings in September.

A preliminary report in May blamed a confluence of factors, including worries over rising sovereign debt and a lack of marketwide circuit breakers, but the new report is expected to go further.

For now, this much is known: The markets were already down and on edge that morning as Europe’s debt crisis seemed to be spiraling out of control.

As markets fell, a mutual fund manager in Kansas made a big sale of stock futures. The rout, some say, was worsened by a lack of coordination among the dozens of exchanges that make up the modern-day stock market. As the New York Stock Exchange slowed trading, rival exchanges that were more automated allowed the selling to continue.

“It’s just madness to say we don’t know what caused it. We do,” said Steve Wunsch, a market structure consultant. “The crash was an inevitable consequence of creating multiple market centers.”

That is one explanation. Others have pointed to the high-frequency traders, who use powerful computers to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed. Some of these traders, who now dominate the stock market, appear to have fled the market as prices went haywire.

Then their computer programs might have dragged down exchange-traded funds, popular investment vehicles that fell sharply during the crash, said Thomas Peterffy, chief executive of Interactive Brokers.

“Computerized arbitrage kicked in,” he said.

But if Nanex’s theory is to be believed, computer algorithms might have been at work as well, knowingly or unknowingly wreaking havoc and creating data crop circles.

“There is a credible allegation that there is seriously abusive practices going on,” said James J. Angel, a financial market analyst specialist at Georgetown University, “to the extent that somebody is firing in a very high frequency of orders for no good economic reason, basically because they are trying to slow everybody else down.”

At a Washington hearing on the flash crash last week, Kevin Cronin, director of global equity trading at Invesco, a big fund manager, warned about “improper or manipulative activity” in the stock market.

Traders at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto said they had also identified a “data deluge” a few minutes before the crash. They said people in the markets were poring over Nanex’s colorful charts.

“Whether they are intentional or not, the regulators should be looking into it closely,” said Doug Clark, managing director of BMO Capital Markets.

In an Aug. 5 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Senator Edward E. Kaufman, Democrat of Delaware, warned about a “micro-arms race that is being waged in our public marketplace by high-frequency traders and others.” He said that the traders were moving so fast that regulators could not keep up.

The idea that shadowy computer masterminds were trying to disrupt the nation’s stock trading struck many people as ridiculous. Wall Street experts generally characterize it as a conspiracy theory with little basis in fact.

But some of the patterns suggested that traders might have been testing their high-speed computers, perhaps to see how rivals would react.

Or it may just be that the computers produced so much data so quickly that exchanges simply could not cope with the onslaught.

“We live in a day when things are measured in milliseconds,” said Sang Lee of the Aite Group, a financial services consulting company. “It is meant to be a level playing field, but if you have better technology you will have the edge.”

Back in Chicago, Mr. Hunsader of Nanex is still not sure what his crop circles mean. But that does not stop him from admiring them.

“The patterns are quite beautiful,” he said. “We can’t see any economic reasons for what they are doing.”

[Ripzalot]

I'm loving it.

[4matic]

It sounds like “Wall Street” meets “The X-Files.”

.”

Only the time frames have changed. None of this is new. Long term value is still best reflected in the daily and weekly charts.

[Verde]

In a recent blog post on SeekingAlpha.com Mark Cuban (yes, that Mark Cuban) provided some advice regarding what you should do with your money:

I’m not saying you should get out of the stock market. What I am saying is that it is not a bad thing to accumulate cash right now

As I was reading the attached comments, I nearly spit coffee all over my monitor when I saw the following:

Hey, I have a better idea. Create a company in the midst of a tech bubble that really has no use, sell it for billions to someone with very deep pockets who was just in the bubble pumping party earlier than you, watch the company vanish in thin air a few years later, buy a basketball team and act like a little spoiled teenager on the sideline, and then pretend you're a financial expert.

Can't wait to see you act like the second coming of Ted Turner when you buy a baseball team.

Give 'em hell, Benny!