Yep. It's just wholesale fucking thievery. If it were institutionals primarily on the other side you can bet your ass all those trades would be broken. What happened on Monday (particularly with "low volatility" ETFs) is direct evidence of how completely broken these markets continue to be. Meanwhile Virtu gloats about making a killing on that day. Just so incredibly broken.
There was an interesting debate about all of this on Radio 4 BBC last night, there normally record all shows. Not the usual CNBC crap.
I remember late last week (Aug 19-21) that the typical tell-tale signs of intervention were notably absent...once those Fed minutes were released and the market gunned back to the previous close it was orderly selling without the "buy em ugly" bid appearing at critical levels...then on Friday with that ugly close I remember looking around and all I saw were people bullish or buying on the declines (because everyone is conditioned to look for the massive snapback rally), then Sunday night the selling just started cascading and those deep OTM puts had been bid to stratospheric prices on the previous Friday (market was already pricing in a crash to some extent)...just surreal watching it cascade lower last sunday night... As others have opined, it felt like a "test run" for a higher rate environment...how much liquidity did (or did not) exist to absorb an environment that was less accommodating...the "flush" seems like it was immaterial to the bigger picture (the sheeple don't even dictate market prices any longer) - after all the entire ride higher there appear to have been outflows (maybe that changed in the past few years)...but we know most of this has just been the expanding balance sheet...and the msm ignores the ugliness of what really transpires with these broken markets and fixates on any positive market movements...
I like this thread. But i see a lot of economic/fundamental bias rather than alignment with the reality of the market price.
Realistically I feel we're all really just trading with or against the Fed. The market ceased to be reality probably close to a decade ago.
What wrong with this? Do you prefer the market that been manipulated by a few big players and hedge funds/big bank? Do you think fed/gov care about the gamblers (aka day traders)? It actually amaze me why they never block or highly restrict this day trade activities which is no different than gambling in casino ?
I don't usually spend alot of time looking at individual stock charts, but on occasion when I want to get a better feel for the entire "market", I'll look at just about everything...that includes corporate high yield debt, component stocks, options skew, etc, etc...All I can say is that aside from the headline indicies (which caught up to the deterioration of many sectors), the market has been breaking down for months already...Bring up just about any of the Dow Industrials component stocks and all you will see are parabolic stock charts that topped out, put in lower highs, broke major trendline support and are pulling back...Aside from a handful of "glam" stocks in the Nasdaq 100 (the same ones the MSM media talks about every day), the rest of the market has been pricing in a downturn... And those same handful of glamorous stocks that are heavily weighted in the indicies and can move them to marginal new highs (with a negative ADV/DECL like it did in mid July) have had their parabolic "blow off" moves, just like in 99-00...not coincidentally right around those all time highs in the NDX from 15 years ago...now we got a break and the skew in EVERY stock has exploded...it was a marketwide re-pricing of tails risk...that didn't happen in Oct 2014... btw, it's also interesting to note that some of the Junk Bond ("High Yield") etf's staged a large comeback last week on the back of higher oil prices...so that was a positive for the market that assisted in the rally...
Last week futures collapsed overnight, can the same thing be said for tonight, no....so my take is after a huge ending to the week I think futures will see a bright spot tonight, I think people already forgot what a down market feels like and are anticipating another move higher going into monday, so keep those rally hats on as the dow makes its way back to 17,000....i will continue to add more short positions on every tick higher as I know the market is certainly not done going down, down, down :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek: