"I don’t know if we are out of the woods, no one knows. And it should not matter to us. We should only follow price, and price is going down, has been for a couple weeks now." – Optrader
No reading list on this one right now, although the Education section on StockCharts has been referenced as a good place to learn the basics. We can add to this area as we develop a better sense of good introductory material.
Manipulating the Markets – One place trends come from. Phil lays out the simple case for how a big player can spend a little and save a lot.
Manipulating the markets – this is what Cramer was talking about with RIMM. There are certain stocks that “lever” the markets – GOOG, AAPL, MSFT, MOT, TXN, IBM, EBAY, AMZN… if I boost those, and they trade a grand total of perhaps $10Bn a day, do you not think I can keep up the entire $8T Nasdaq? How much would it cost me. Let’s say I’m Fidelity and have $2T under management with $800Bn in Nasdaq stocks. I want to get down to $500Bn without killing the market so I buy $2Bn a day worth of those guys and selll everything else, let’s say $10Bn a day. It would take me 2 months of pumping to reduce my wider positions by 40% and would have “cost” me $80Bn but I put that $80Bn into large liquid postions and even if they drop 20% while I get out of them, I only lose $16Bn in order to cash out $300Bn worth of positions, just over 5%… In reality, you don’t have to spend that much as 20% is a huge buy-in and, if you are Goldman Sachs, you can always just add a couple of those stocks to your “focus list” and make a few positive comments about tech and get out with a huge profit. This is like a violent game of musical chairs and when there are fewer and fewer chairs you can be sure the big boys won’t be shy about pushing and shoving to make sure they get the last seat when the music stops.
