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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (91487)	5/8/2010 5:16:11 AM
From: Maurice Winn	6 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 197252

Jon, in fact some people are forced to sell at whatever price their financial institution can get when they have plunged into margin call territory. <you do realize : no one was forced to sell @ $0.01 ? I really do not understand why people observe something "nuts," and think : Okay, everyone else seems to think it is a good idea to : jump off of a building sell shares of a $40.00 stock for $0.01 > The fun didn't look like fat fingers, faulty markets or anything like that. It looked like PhD mathematicians with powerful computers dueling with their competitors and selling to create a downdraft to test reactions, then selling some more to put the frighteners on competing computers, which say "I'll see you and raise $1 billion" which then causes a swarm of STOP loss orders to be crashed and join the flood of sales, which plunges past all the buy orders, with the computers playing chicken to see who is brave enough to buy at the bottom. Then they all pile back in and do the same on the way back up. At the end, the winning computers have extracted loads of loot from the losing computers and have done a lot of market clearing of people who were keen to sell their shares at low "STOP" positions, or who were deep into margin territory, or who simply panicked and sold because everyone was selling - they would have had to be quick to get their orders in to sell. It was a probabilistic adventure into the liquidity of the market, margin levels and reactions, STOP levels, and what have you, by mathematicians and modeling and reaction times and "thinking" that their competitors were doing. An excellent thing to do. Those of us who missed it remained unaffected [other than the overall drop which probably was on the cards anyway]. That's my theory. So now I shall enter some low buying prices at which I'd be very happy to meet the dueling computers and mathematicians on the way down. If a computer wants to sell some QCOM at $20 I am happy to help them with their investigations. Maybe $20 is too low. Perhaps $30 would be more like it. It will annoy me if the Nasdaq people decide to void my buy and give the money to the computer people who precipitate the drop, as they have announced they will do for shares which dropped "too" much. "Too" much for what? Unless there was a fraudulent trade, why should the trades be canceled? That's ridiculous and rewards the people who they accuse of doing bad things. The computers will think, "Hmm, if I really crash the price, I'll be able to do trades which I won't have to fulfill because the Nasdaq humans will cancel them for me. Cool! I'll plan on keeping the other trades and being let off the ones at the bottom." Mqurice