"When Russian table tennis or Korean baseball won’t scratch the itch, some are trying their hand at trading equities. It’s enough to move the market, analysts say."
"Millions of small-time investors have opened trading accounts in recent months, a flood of new buyers unlike anything the market had seen in years, just as lockdown orders halted entire sectors of the economy and sent unemployment soaring. It’s not clear how many of the new arrivals are sports bettors, but some are behaving like aggressive gamblers. There has been a jump in small bets in the stock options market, where wagers on the direction of share prices can produce thrilling scores and gut-wrenching losses. And transactions that make little economic sense, like buying up the nearly valueless shares of bankrupt companies, are off the charts."https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/business/sports-gamblers-stocks-virus.htmlZany action in recent days has me convinced. Apparently these guys (and gals) are watching every short term development or coment by an official and placing wagers on which way the indexes will move.
- Week ago - Payroll numbers better than expected - Powerful up day
- Thursday - Covid 19 redeveloping in China - Powerful down day
- Monday - Friday's steep dive continues until Fed Chair Powell reveals Fed is buying Corporate bonds - Market reverses, makes up 700 point drop (Dow) and ends day higher
- Tuesday - Monday's rally continues after strong overnight futures - some based on reports of a trillion dollar infrastructure plan in the works. Morning's hotter than expected retail sales numbers add fuel to the fire.
- Later Tuesday - Dow falls about 500 points from day's high, apparently on comments Fed Chair Powell makes to Congress that deficit spending will hurt us longer term. But later recovers (based on whatever else he said)
Just watching. You'd need to be insane to try to time or outsmart this market. A lot of short term dumb money sloshing around.
