Agree we never know for sure when it is the PPT and when it is real buying by some other large hedge fund, a broker that may be trying to front run orders they know they have etc. I haven't looked at any charts yet from yesterday so I can't comment on much. I am not shorting this yet and will wait to see how high they want to ramp it before I step in front of this train. I did hedge or sell my longs Thursday though ahead of my surgery yesterday. Feels good sitting mainly in cash except for a few LEAP calls with short calls against those positions.
Here are those middle two articles that the links went stale on..........
THIS GUY CAN RESCUE GREENSPAN AND MARKETS
Tuesday,March 13,2001
By JOHN CRUDELE
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THE most important guy in the world right now is Peter Fisher.
Peter who?
Forget about Alan Greenspan. The Federal Reserve chairman had his chance to solve a stock market problem that he created by allowing a speculative bubble to form. Fisher is the guy who now has to rescue Greenspan.
Let me introduce you to Peter Fisher.
Right now he is the little-known executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A Democrat, Fisher had been the fixer during the Clinton administration - the guy who kept in constant touch with the important people on Wall Street who made problems go away.
They'd whisper to Fisher that the market was in trouble, and the New York Fed would fix the problem. In no small way, this sort of collusion helped create the problem, but that's a story for another day.
In fact, Fisher's job as a fixer was so important that the Wall Street Journal once did a peculiar feature story about the early morning antics of this Fed kingpin. But the newspaper missed the main point: Fisher wasn't just innocently monitoring markets, he was manipulating them.
Why is Fisher so important now?
Because he was recently nominated for Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance. And in that job he'd officially be in charge of domestic debt management policies and programs for the federal government.
Unofficially, he'll be the liaison between the Bush administration and Wall Street. He would be, in other words, Bush's go-to man in the same way that he and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did during the Clinton years.
Anyone who has been watching the financial markets of late knows why Fisher is so important. The stock market is collapsing. And even after yesterday's devastation, the market could still go into a freefall stage.
This torture isn't about to end soon. With the Fed unable to boost the economy fast enough through interest rate cuts, the stocks that are represented by the Dow and S&P indices are likely to be a lot lower before they start moving up.
And if the Dow and S&P keep falling, people will notice.
That's what Peter Fisher has to stop. So what can Fisher do that Greenspan can't? He has to rig the stock market.
There is something called the Working Group on Financial Markets - a.k.a. the Plunge Protection Team. Fisher is an important PPT member, along with Greenspan and officials of the Securities & Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange Commission.
The Team knows what it has to do. It has to create artificial buying to sop up some of the very real selling that's going on right now.
The last time I suggested rigging the market I was inundated with hate mail from purists. The Japanese may do it, they said. But America doesn't rig its markets, they screamed.
Not true.
America rigs its bond markets whenever the U.S. Treasury adds or subtracts from the amount of public debt. The currency markets are constantly rigged. And the stock market is, but mainly through the movement of interest rates.
Greenspan and George W. Bush just aren't very good at the art of rigging.
Fisher is better.
He has already orchestrated the bailout of Long Term Capital Management, which nearly caused the collapse of the world financial system back in 1998. And Fisher has done any number of other market rescues through those early morning phone calls with his pals in the Wall Street bull community.
Fisher can't be timid about the current situation.
He and the Bush administration need to inject money directly into the market. They need to buy the heck out of stock index futures contracts, which will give a lift to the entire equities market.
Forget about waiting for interest rate cuts. By the time Greenspan's solution starts working we'll all be broke
nypostonline.com
By L3_Aka_L3 on Saturday, December 09, 2000 - 05:57 pm: Edit
HOW STOCKS TURNED BACK FROM THE ABYSS
By JOHN CRUDELE
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SOMETHING happened at around 1 p.m. our time yesterday that pulled the stock market back from the edge of the cliff.
Traders say it was almost like divine intervention. One minute the Nasdaq was down 11 percent -- say it out loud, "Eleven percent in one day" -- and then it suddenly rallied several hundred points in the matter of an hour.
The Dow followed suit. Down 500 points around mid-day, the blue chip index's decline -- along with the horrible showing of over-the-counter stocks -- was destined to make yesterday's market an unqualified disaster for investors and the country.
Then, traders said, someone started buying large amounts of stock index futures contracts through two major brokerage firms -- Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. These transactions are usually done on the QT so we don't really know how many of these contracts were purchased.
And unless the brokers tell, there is no way of knowing which of their clients were making the purchases. Goldman wouldn't comment on this and Merrill did not return a call for comment.
But traders said enough were bought to catch everyone's attention. In fact, the buyers seemed to want people to know they had an appetite for stocks.
Then the market rebounded.
It didn't go all the way back. At the end of the day the Dow Jones index had still lost lost 56 points or half a percent on the day. And the Nasdaq lost another 74 points, or the equivalent of a 1.77 percent drop. Yesterday's loss by over-the-counter stocks nearly put the Nasdaq index back to ground zero for the year -- in two days all but 2 percent of its gain for the year was gone.
It was real nice of Goldman and Merrill to stick their necks out like that. In fact, it was downright uncharacteristic for Wall Street outfits to put the thought of possible losses aside for the greater good.
Because of the purely unselfish nature of what went on, traders are naturally suspicious. Hell, so am I.
"I think some one or more persons saved the market today. There was a suspicious urge to buy stocks at an opportune time," says one trader. "Why drive the Dow up 350 points in a half hour? That's never serious buying. That's someone trying to establish prices," he adds.
I'm especially suspicious when the market suddenly rebounds at nearly the very same moment that a member of the Clinton administration -- economic advisor Gene Sperling -- is on TV telling investors not to worry.
And there's the obvious connection between Goldman Sachs and the administration, the Wall Street firm having given Robert Rubin to the Clinton administration as its Treasury Secretary.
Plus, what better way to make investors not worry than by having the stock market recover a lot of the ground it had just lost. That gesture almost makes a guy want to buy some stock -- bottom fish, if you are into sporting analogies.
I'm not saying that government intervention in a collapsing market is wrong. In fact -- except for the obvious contradictions with the free-market system -- it is politically and socially a very right thing to do.
I've written about this before. And I've mentioned that Washington has had a secretive group call the Working Group on Financial Markets, made up of investment industry and government people, that would be in just the right position to rescue the market.
Informally the folks on Wall Street call this the "Plunge Protection Team." In February 1997, the Washington Post did a piece on this team, just in case you don't believe it exists.
And while I can't swear that Goldman and Merrill are captains of that team, they sure acted like it yesterday.
nypost.com
Good Luck,
Lee |
