contradicted yourself there, you took a gamble when you picked a side,neither dems nor reps are on your side,it is a gamble and the public is running away from investing in droves,the banks are now scalping in 30 -40 pt es swings,you could trade less often and spend most of the time watching ,waiting,til this crap is settled
How many different "the markets are crap" threads are you going to start? No wonder you're so angry all the time, you're getting your clock cleaned.
Agreed there is no reason to participate eg today at 3:45pm EST, IP had traded about 2.9 million shares and had an imbalance of 433,800 if my math is correct that is about 15% imbalance, in 2007 this would have crashed the market, today IP only moved down 14 cents and at 4:00pm, 195k imbalance remained i.e. specialist (market maker) absorbed. Given the fiscal cliff, the weekend, shortened trading on Monday why would specialist (market maker) absorb the 195k shares instead of letting the market run?
I'm not going to contribute anything productive but just wanted to say that it always goes right over my head when someone refers to a market as 'crap' (or any other variety of synonyms). As far as I know the markets don't have to do anything but match buyers and sellers, which it does pretty well. They're not 'crap', you (and a lot of other traders) just can't draw a meaningful conclusion (right now) from the data you're looking at.
Why so disgruntled? Situations like this provide for pretty good trading, imo. It's the absence of news that leads to a dead, narrow range, barely tradeable market. Today was great! Who cares what's happening in DC. Just trade what the market gives you.
"Agreed there is no reason to participate" is my point. In days like this where market is completely dependent upon news and participation is not wide, its more apt to be manipulated. I am not implying that in IP's case there was manipulation, I am just pointing out that circumtances were questionable. Keep in mind that there was uptick in volume since 12/11.