I daytraded this stock all day today. I sold my second to last shares at 90 7/8 no more than ten minutes prior to the close. The drop from there to 87 happened in that short period of time. In fact, I bought the ones I sold at 90 7/8 back at 88 minutes later and thought I'd done a helluva trade, but they hit all the bids to finish it off, no doubt to create a bearish chart (which they succeeded in doing). Check out reversals in AMAT, GBLX, INTC, DELL, to name a few. Also of interest to understand what was going on:
Get With the Programs
By James J. Cramer
5/13/99 4:34 PM ET
Hold it!
I just heard on the box that there were no sell programs to speak of today. That's just plain WRONG!
NDX sell programs and MSH sell programs (tech and more tech) colored things throughout the day and accelerated at the bell. They were relentless. These programs were directly responsible for the vast majority of the OTC weakness.
What triggers them? Chiefly, fears generated by Oracle (ORCL:Nasdaq). Secondarily, worries sown by Wall Street firms about Intel's (INTC:Nasdaq) earnings. Third, IBM's (IBM:NYSE) diss of everybody else but IBM.
Why did we set up this online financial information system? One reason is that, when you get total disinformation, such as "there were no programs," I can tell you, wait a second, I saw a gazillion of them today.
Does that mean that the Nasdaq wouldn't have gone down without them?
Absolutely not.
It just means that the frightening pace of the decline can be pinned directly to managers putting on massive short positions in derivatives that instantly spilled over to the stocks.
For me, as I have indicated, I used the programs to do some buying, but not much, because I don't want to be in too big when Oracle explains that all is bad in PCs and dots and that's why ORCL is doing badly. I nibbled at Cisco (CSCO:Nasdaq), I bought a little Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq). Nothing big.
But I always let the programs work for me. You can, too, provided you know that's what's driving things. You sure wouldn't know that from listening to the talking heads. Oh yeah, the programs started at 1:30 p.m., case you were wondering.
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