[expat_panama]

It's the Ides of Septempber and with stocks it's onward and upward onward!  After yesterday's mixed in lower volume futures traders now see more mixed.   They got metals up today and gold/silver are presently at $1,322.14/$19.05.

Today's the day everything gets reported:

8:30 AM Initial Claims
8:30 AM Continuing Claims
8:30 AM Retail Sales
8:30 AM Retail Sales ex-auto
8:30 AM PPI
8:30 AM Core PPI
8:30 AM Philadelphia Fed
8:30 AM Current Account Balance
8:30 AM Empire Manufacturing
9:15 AM Industrial Production
9:15 AM Capacity Utilization
10:00 AM Business Inventories
10:30 AM Natural Gas Inventories

That should mean something right? What about:

Bond Yields Surging, and That's Dangerous - A. Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph
The Stock Market's Mechanism Broken For Now - Doug Kass, RealMoney
Bond Market Flashes Sign Not Seen Since '12 - Eliza Ronalds-Hannon,BBW
To Pols, It's Always the 1933 Economy - Kevin Williamson, National Review
What Occupy Wall Street Got Wrong - Alex Shephard, The New Republic
What Is Barney Frank Doing Working For a Bank? - Danielle Balbi, NYO
How to View a Richer Year for Poor & Middle Class - Quoctrung Bui, NYT
How Annual Household Income Gains Are Flawed - John Crudele, NYP
Obama's Pen and Phone Cost Taxpayers $31B - John Merline, Investor's

[raybbr]

As long as the money changers can count on the fed to prop up the market it will keep going. As soon as the idea sinks in that hellery drops out or loses, then yellen will raise rates to sink the economy. Just before that, though, she will warn the money changers and they will hedge their bets and not lose a dime but the rest of us will become further indebted to the great money machine in D.C.

[citizen]

From one of your links:
Put simply, the quants have ruined our markets by exaggerating short-term price moves...

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This seems true.
High-volume program trades for a few pennies/share up or down do distort the markets.
Many of these moves are the result of a FED member or other notable saying the right (or wrong) thing.
Or because some reported value came in "higher (or lower) than expected."

I'm just a dumb guy reading the internet but it's obvious that these days the fundamentals of a given stock, industry or commodity are farther down the list of value criteria than they used to be.