Whack-A-VIX Takes On New Level of Desperation

It wasn't until the market went negative and already started rolling over that the VIX was Whacked down to a new intraday low, but the close is a piece of art that I may have to frame.

Some people say, "This manipulation is just going to keep going, what's the point".

From my point of view, these are moves of absolute desperation, the money literally is not there, if you don't trust those readings, then how can you argue with breadth readings in which more stocks are moving to lower lows every day?

My view is this desperation to scratch and claw for +.04% like yesterday or +.02% the day before or even .35% (DOW-previous 3-days), which is a move so infinitesimally small, not so long ago it wasn't even worth mentioning, an average move was .75% to 1.25%, that was an average move, a move worth talking about was +2%-3%.

It seems there's an absolute desperation to make the SPX new closing high, for what reason when the rest of the market is crumbling around us (as seen in market breadth), I have no idea, perhaps some options, some kind of derivatives.

These tiny, volume-less, breadth-less gains that everyone knows are pure manipulation of anything they can get to move like the VIX today, while stock's crumble and smart money moves out, as well as insiders sell, have some point or reason, but if the money is not there, smart money is moving out to the point in which it's not just on 3C charts but physically in deteriorating breadth/ stock prices now at the point of growing worse just about EVERY DAY, I have to say my initial impression is not to be emotionally scared off by this when the money is not there, they're after something for some reason so bad that that they are willing to concede the game as volume is smaller and smaller every day (new lows for the year every day), they are willing to permanently lose that volume for something that is close enough that they are scratching for it.

This looks like a perfect black swan, I think now more than ever it's important to make decisions based on fact and logic and not emotion.

If we were moving 1+% a day, breadth was improving, money was coming in to the market, insiders were buying, smart money was moving in, volume was rising, that's a totally different scenario, this is the exact opposite in every sense except for price.

The VIX...

 This looked bad enough, but the last minute of the day...

 And there it is, the VIX moved 42 cents from the intraday high to the low at the 2nd to last minute of trade and then lost 30 cents in the last minute alone.

 The Dow vs the VIX, I didn't see Dow futures last night, but in last night's post, the SPX and especially the NASDAQ positive divergence were very clear, this overnight ramp in to the lowest possible volume of the continuous trading period is obviously the easiest way to ramp the market and we see that on opening gains, after that though the market barely moves, some of the averages are slipping and the VIX is slaughtered to save the day. It won't take some 26 year old algo programmer long  to figure out how to take the other side of the trade, I'm surprised they haven't yet and start using this predictable pattern against them.

 SPX vs the VIX, like the other averages around 1 pm the SPX starts to look like it's going to lose the opening gains, cue the VIX.

The NASDAQ 100 futures had the strongest divergence by far as of 2 a.m. last night and it just got stronger from there (1 min chart), giving the NDX a nice gap up, yet they couldn't hold the gains and apparently only the VIX held the NDX off from letting those gains slip away.

I have a couple of ideas for some indicators to show some breadth figures I'm interested in, I'm going to update, check the normal breadth and see if I can get these up and running.