Quick VXX Update

Yesterday the VIX was purposefully slammed to try to push the market higher, this is what we'd call, short term or intraday manipulation or a lever, it rarely has the power to change a developed base, it's just intraday manipulation and it's quite clear, I think the reason is probably quite clear as well when you look at AAPL yesterday and the volume at exactly $600.

Here's a quick look at some of the charts for activity relating to yesterday's VIX slam...

 This is the SPY in green vs. the VXX in red, I should have captured this on my other platform and inverted SPY's price so you can see how out of whack the correlation was, a clear VIX slam to try to help the market as VXX was WAY below the normal correlation between the two assets.

However in the yellow box at the end of the trading day as we noticed a change in character in some 3C charts that had been "blah" all afternoon Market Starting to Reveal More About Intraday Trade, you can see that additional slamming of VIX futures did nothing to move the market higher, this is when the negative divergences formed that are referenced in the link just above from yesterday afternoon.

 This is the trend view of the 1 min VXX chart just for perspective and  the reversal process, interesting that the lest "assumed" head fake move really wasn't that much of a move as it really fits pretty neatly in to the rounding process, but yesterday is a bit different and more along the lines of the location of a head fake move (near the end of the process).

This is a close up of the 1 min chart to see the intraday action, right off the open there was clear distribution, not heavy mind you because we are looking at a 1-min chart, but this is also the timeframe we use to monitor intraday trends and reversals.

Note the in-line status of the early afternoon and as 3C signals improved from "transitional" to negative in the SPY and IWM (the Q's stayed in line for obvious reasons being AAPL has about as much weight as the bottom 50 NASDAQ 100 components combined at last report...being NASDAQ's weighting is proprietary and costs $10k a year for a subscription to find out) and around the same time VXX is showing a positive divergence.

 There was migration as well as you can see on this 2 min chart

And right on out to the 5 min chart which is not  shown in full perspective, but a closer view to see the trend and action more clearly.

Also interesting was the VIX futures themselves on a 5 min chart... They were and are leading positive, so it seems the slam down of the VIX served dual purposes, one was to support the market and two I would venture to say formed a head fake move, I can't say which of the two were more important, however looking at the EOD tape and VIX (first chart) and the fact that the slam couldn't move the market even as AAPL broke $600, I suspect the more important reason may have been the second reason.