Buy/Sell Programs...

Yes, they are the bane of this market. Today was a prime example of how shorts got themselves stopped out above 1,320 in the SPX June futures (with the high of the day being 1,324) before a global sell-program leaned on this thin market and pushed it down a full 1% from the previous day's close, and just about 1.5% from the intraday highs!! This is what I call a total massacre, what technicians frequently refer to as an "island reversal technical pattern", and what surely left a lot of hedge funds/speculative accounts nursing a sore head after a long week. The decent NFP numbers were only part of the excuse. Inflation is still all around us despite the best efforts of the U.S. government and the Fed to convince us otherwise. I am still mighty glad I am out of this market -- one can get whipped around like a milkshake in this see-saw type of price action. It is probably time to think about shorting the SPX after all, if next week doesn't bring respite to the bulls (which looks highly unlikely at this point!)