Big swing in colours and sentiment this week. I'm a little suspicious of the massive down move last week in the US Indices. Was this panic selling, programme selling or a concerted move by a few major players to make huge sums of money? Most of the down move happened in a 20 min period and the SEC is investigating the 'drop and bounce'. I heard of many trades being cancelled by the exchanges on some 'errant' trades where 100 shares were bought of leading US large caps at a few cents etc. All very odd and subsequently trading this week may be very range bound until markets have time to digest all this news and action. The US non-farms were positive though. Leans me towards market manipulation. Citi-Bank did the same thing a few years ago on a lesser scale and got away with it!!Another issue has been the rise of the recent Indices' trends on low volume and I read that due to the exchanges being less centralised there was a lack of liquidity to match trades on certain platforms last week. As there were only a few exchanges some years back, these huge drops were less likely as there was always big volumes in the exchanges. Now that more transactions are conducted off exchange and spread over more dealers etc there has been concern that the lack of volume and liquidity in the major exchanges could have actually precipitated the fall last week as there were no long trades being matched on the other side of the deals. Many people were trapped for the whole move and unable to get in or out; again, the US SEC is investigating...
