Market's late rebound may revive manipulation rumors

San Diego Union Tribune ^ | Don Bauder

[VRWC_minion]

If there's a group manipulating the market then there's absolutely no reason for it to go down ever.

Volume is the reason. Its one thing to bid up the price of stocks sold for a few hours during one day, entirely another to continue that for extended periods of time.

Even the market makers on the stock exchange act as a valve in controling price swings.

[discostu]

You don't swing the Dow 350 points without volume, especially not if everybody else is bidding it down.

[VRWC_minion]

You don't swing the Dow 350 points without volume, especially not if everybody else is bidding it down.

In that the price is set by the last sale, you could theoretically set the market by one sale of stock for each issue. Investors might have enough to keep the price up for a few hours but like you point out, to do so for all potential sellers will take more money than they have.

Here is wild example. I put a purchase order in for 1 of each stock at 150% above market and all were excersized at the same time. At that second, I would increase the value of the market for 1 second. The longer I want to keep the price up and the more sellers the more cash I need.

That is what is wrong with your premise that if a proping up of the market for a few hours is possible that it should be possible for weeks.

[discostu]

But if you watch the chart it's a climb not a jump. It's not like the market was dropping like a stone then all of a sudden 350 points higher then it closed. In theory the model you outlined could be used to keep the market up indefinitely, just buy that 1 share periodically through the day, it's just one share, you could even sell it inbetween buys (to decrease the cash outlay), just make sure the last action is a buy and the market will always finish in OK shape. It just doesn't add up. Why stop the market from droping 400 monday but still let it drop 166 the next? Why apply the brakes but still let things go through a death dive? Again, in order to pull off what "they've done" the PPT would have to be really powerful, but in order to "allow" what's gone on they'd have to be pretty much useless. Can't have it both ways. Either these guys are butch enough to orchestrate the market or they're not.

No matter how you slice it if this stuff is the activity of a PPT then the people on it are boobs. It's a totally reactive profile and any efective form of plunge protection would have to be proactive. As any 5 year old that's watched a coyote-roadrunner cartoon can tell you, the best way to not fall of a cliff is to not hang out on mountains. If you have a real PPT acting intelligently they would have never allowed the market to get so grossly overvalued in the first place. Plus a proactive method would protect this clandestine group from detection.

[discostu]

But if you watch the chart it's a climb not a jump. It's not like the market was dropping like a stone then all of a sudden 350 points higher then it closed. In theory the model you outlined could be used to keep the market up indefinitely, just buy that 1 share periodically through the day, it's just one share, you could even sell it inbetween buys (to decrease the cash outlay), just make sure the last action is a buy and the market will always finish in OK shape. It just doesn't add up. Why stop the market from droping 400 monday but still let it drop 166 the next? Why apply the brakes but still let things go through a death dive? Again, in order to pull off what "they've done" the PPT would have to be really powerful, but in order to "allow" what's gone on they'd have to be pretty much useless. Can't have it both ways. Either these guys are butch enough to orchestrate the market or they're not.

No matter how you slice it if this stuff is the activity of a PPT then the people on it are boobs. It's a totally reactive profile and any efective form of plunge protection would have to be proactive. As any 5 year old that's watched a coyote-roadrunner cartoon can tell you, the best way to not fall of a cliff is to not hang out on mountains. If you have a real PPT acting intelligently they would have never allowed the market to get so grossly overvalued in the first place. Plus a proactive method would protect this clandestine group from detection.

[joyful1]

I do not doubt that it is Middle East money related manipulation.

[discostu]

Oops, mouse button funkyness. I sware I only hit the button once, saw it double clutch on the button though. Wish we had self delete capabilities in the threads like on the state boards.

[Uncle Bill]

SOURCE

The Plunge Protection Team

• THE MOB ON WALL STREET

• How Big Is The Government's Debt? - $33.1 Trillion

[Askel5]

Hey ... the old Plunge Protection Team! Bump.

Interesting bit on Cendant. Can't we blame that on Clinton given the '98 date of the fall from grace?

[rdavis84]

"In order for this PPT thing to exist within the available evidence we have to have a group so powerful that they can move the DOW hundreds of points in a matter of hours, but so weak they haven't been able to do anything about the steady unwind of the market in 2002."
24 posted on 7/16/02 11:09 AM Central by discostu

I'm thinking you don't agree that there IS a Plunge Protection Team, is that correct?

"you are correct, there is no such thing as the ppt, it is nothing except the flakey invention of the perpetual conspiracy crowd who don't understand markets and need something on which to place blame for things that mystify them"
42 posted on 7/16/02 12:25 PM Central by AntiScumbag

You too. (then you both started weasel wording out of that)

Plunge Protection Team
By Brett D. Fromson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 23, 1997; Page H01
The Washington Post (EXCERPTED)

"In the Oval Office, the president confers with the members of his Working Group on Financial Markets -- the secretary of the treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission."

"The group, established after the 1987 stock drop, is the government's high-level forum for discussion of financial policy."

"These quiet meetings of the Working Group are the financial world's equivalent of the war room. The officials gather regularly to discuss options and review crisis scenarios because they know that the government's reaction to a crumbling stock market would have a critical impact on investor confidence around the world."

"In the event of a financial crisis, each federal agency with a seat at the table of the Working Group has a confidential plan. At the SEC, for example, the plan is called the "red book" because of the color of its cover. It is officially known as the Executive Directory for Market Contingencies. The major U.S. stock markets have copies of the commission's plan as well as the CFTC's."

"The red book is intended to make sure that no matter what the time of day, SEC officials can reach their opposite numbers at other agencies of the U.S. government, with foreign governments, at the various stock, bond and commodity futures and options exchanges, as well as executives of the many payment and settlement systems underlying the financial markets."

[arete]

You're wasting you time. If they haven't grasped it by now, they're not going to.

Richard W.

[headsonpikes]

They're happy to just watch the broker's yachts slide effortlessly down the Hudson.

Customer's yachts? We don't need no steenkin' yachts!

[discostu]

A I didn't weasel word anything. B I've read the article and am wholy unimpressed. All it's got is some stuff that's well known (yes there is a group watching the market and they've been given the ability to turn things off for a time if things get really ugly, all of which was documented by Tom Clancy in Debt of Honor long before this article was written) and completely uninteresting, then a laundry list of stuff they "could" do with not one drop of evidence any of those things has ever been done.

I always judge conspiracy theories the same way. I look at what they're supposed to be doing. Then I come with with two methods to accomplish that goal, the first being the best way I can think to do it the second being the worst. Then I look at the "evidence" if the evidence is a dead ringer for my worst possible way to accomplish the goal I write off the conspiracy theory as paranoid interpretation of normal events. If it resembles my best way to do it I learn to accept that they will win. If it's somewhere in between I do a deeper analysis, luckily 99% of the time the evidence looks just like my "only an idiot would..." outline.

As I've said over and over, if you were going to put together a conspiracy to manipulate the stock market having them be reactive and only respond to huge dips and have their response be blatant and rapid plus side manipulation is just dumb and not very effective. If you have the tools to do that (notice the big if there, not saying there is a conspiracy, only saying how to make one work IF such a thing exists) much more subtle manipulations would achieve the desired effect with a lot less chaos and wierdness. If I were in charge of a PPT what I would have done is hold the market down and keep it from getting so grossly over valued, best way to avoid a plunge is to never set things up for one in the first place.

[discostu]

Says you. I'm happy having analyzed this situation and come to the conclusion that if there is a PPT it's made up of such high end morons that they are no threat since the method "they are using" to manipulate the markets is absolutely the stupidest possible way to do it. At least the stupidest one I can think of.

[RightWhale]

Down 166 today

Yesterday the Monday uncertainty sell orders suddenly became buy orders for the last part of the session. Everybody changed their mind at once like they all use a similar decision-maker brand of software. Today, the market swing limiters were in place just in case, but they weren't needed to any great degree. They have all bid the market down too quickly as usual and will probably bid it back up too quickly as well. Always overshooting.

[AntiScumbag]

You too. (then you both started weasel wording out of that)

weasel wording?

some of my next words were

the perpetual conspiracy crowd who don't understand markets and need something on which to place blame for things that mystify them

which accurately describes you, and anyone else who buys the baloney, to a tee

perhaps i should have added "and who have not the slightest iota of proof to back up their ludicrous assertions", but i figured that "conspiracy crowd" covered that

i know it won't stop you from embarrassing yourself further, but you should be aware that there is nothing new under the sun

back in '29 and '30, j.p. morgan and his buddies actually were a sort of informal ppt, they used to spread rumors that they were buying, and actually did a lot of buying into sharp sell-offs to try to stem the tide

it didn't work

cost 'em a ton of money as their artificially inspired rallies quickly evaporated and they learned, just as bunker hunt did in silver in 1980, and just as countless others have over the decades (including many central banks), that nobody is bigger than the market

believe it or not, explosive short-covering/bargain-hunting rallies happen all the time in bear markets when the supply of panicked and fearful sellers is temporarily exhausted

buyers appear out of their own self-interest, not because someone asked them to or told them to

[discostu]

Give the man a dollar. Up 175 right now. Interestingly enough Clancy talks about this in Debt of Honor too (smart guy Tom), he puts in a big discussion on how most of the mutual funds (especially the big ones) use nearly identical software to make their decisions which causes jumps to become trends. I also think 24 hour news and the net play into this some. Thanks to them most people that have enough money to play the market can watch the market twitch all day in real time (or inbetween meetings in nearly real time) which causes trend truncation (don't rule out the effects of the little guy, one person can't effect the market much, a few million all making decisions based on the same CNN story can move a lot of shares) because people can react immediately instead of at the end of the day like it used to be (when we found out what happenED with the markets at the end of the day rather than what's happenING). You used to see the same behavior in the market only instead of it happening over a day or two like now it happened over a week or two.