Well, I had to get sleep sooner or later, so I did. I woke up about 15 or 20 minutes ago, just in time to see the market go into one of those hyper selloffs that only a bunch of machines could engineer. Some people call them quants. Who knows? The Dow was down 800 points a few minutes ago. Now it's "settled" in at about -409. I saw Apple tick down at warp speed to 200 (technically, 199.25 was the low). A bunch of people added shares of AAPL below 225. Wow!
I tried to get out of NBG, but it wasn't happening. Between my inner conflict — why sell when the machines will bring prices back up tomorrow or next year — and the speed of it all, I couldn't get those chunks of baklava sold at all through my broker. I'm not mad at the broker. I'm mad at myself for not being in cash, at least 60% as I was most of last month. But I'm also moving on.
Somewhere, someone has calculated the possibilities and odds of this kind of day. It probably happens once or twice a year. Maybe more. He or she has loaded up their dry powder for such a day. When the quants kick in a full bore, this genius sets all phasers on kill and does all the buying necessary for at least one season. The genius swooped in and bought AAPL (low 199.25, now 243), BIDU (low 625, now 656), C (low 3.90, now 4.06,), DNDN (low 42.45, now 48.46), F (low 10.59, now 11.48), GS (low 139.06, now 142), IMAX (low 17.50, now 18.54), NFLX (low 90.00, now 94)...
Not to mention the contrary weapons like FAZ (closed yesterday at 12.74, opened at 12.56, high 15.97, now 14.49), VXX (closed yesterday at 23.33, opened at 24.01, high 31.54, now 27.45), UUP (up 0.22 to 24.83) and GLD up 2.61 to 117.70.
The talking heads on CNBC were basically undecipherable for that stretch when the Dow was -600, then -700, and then -800. One person talking over the other talking over the other. Just about the only sane human was Jim Cramer, trying to explain that the machines were (briefly) in control.
Yes they were.
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