Crazy Ivan, Clearing the Baffles

That's what I call it, but in reality it's just running the stops. The few firms that are trading this week are going to have a hard time making money in this low volume environment, thus my warning sunday night about volatility this week.

As you can see, the holiday season has killed volume.

So firms that are trading are doing what they can to make money and the easy fallback is always running the stops, especially when people who go on vacation during the holiday season make sure to log a stop with their broker, which any of these firms can see as they are on the books, this is why I don't ever place orders, except manually. If we consider Thursday's close the median last week (white line), you can see yesterday they took out the stops on the longs-(remember the NASDAQ was down yesterday morning over .80% in 15 minutes?) That's represented by the red line. Today they took out the stops on the shorts to the upside and maybe triggered some longs as well (green line). This has almost nothing to do with price discovery and almost everything to do with fishing expeditions to try to make a few bucks in an environment where there aren't many players to take money from.