The coming crash

If you couldn't tell by the time stamp of my previous post, I was up very late Saturday. All was not lost as besides the beautiful song by Fink, I came across a fascinating piece by Tyler Durdan of Zero Hedge. It explains in technical detail the anatomy of recent market meltdowns and why another one is in our immediate future.

One characteristic of what I am labeling a "Wave 4" rally over the past month is that so much of the market movement from day to day has been taking place in aftermarket and Globex trading. Huge morning gaps make up most of the price movement, with little if any follow through during regular market trading. This article addresses the dynamics behind this kind of market movement, with a foreboding hypothesis as to where it is leading prices into the not-to-distant future.

The article is linked above, but here are some salient excerpts:

In this light, the program trading spike over the past week could be perceived as much more sinister. For conspiracy lovers, long searching for any circumstantial evidence to catch the mysterious "plunge protection team" in action, you should look no further than this.

Following on the circumstantial evidence track, as Zero Hedge pointed out previously, over the past month, the Volume Weighted Average Price of the SPY index indicates that the bulk of the upswing has been done through low volume buying on the margin and from overnight gaps in afterhours market trading. The VWAP of the SPY through yesterday indicated that the real price of the S&P 500 would be roughly 60 points lower, or about 782, if the low volume marginal transactions had been netted out.


What retail investors fail to acknowledge is that the quants close out a majority of their ultra-short term positions at the end of each trading day, meaning that the vanilla money is stuck as a hot potato bagholder to what can only be classified as an unprecedented ponzi scheme. As the overall market volume is substantially lower now than it has been in the recent past, this strategy has in fact been working and will likely continue to do so... until it fails and we witness a repeat of the August 2007 quant failure events... at which point the market, just like Madoff, will become the emperor revealing its utter lack of clothing.


When the quant deleveraging finally catches up with the market, the consequences will likely be unprecedented, with dramatic dislocations leading the market both higher and lower on record volatility. Furthermore, high convexity names such as double and triple negative ETFs, which are massively disbalanced with regard to underlying values after recent trading patterns, will see shifts which will make the November SRS jump to $250 seem like child's play.


At the end of the day, despite the pronouncements by the administration and more and more sell-side analysts that the market is merely chasing the rebound in fundamentals in what has all of a sudden become a V-shaped recovery, the "rally" could simply be explained by technical factor driven capital-liquidity aberrations, which will continue at most for mere weeks if not days.

So when will all this occur? The quant trader I spoke to would not commit himself to any specific time frame but noted that a date as early as next Monday could be a veritable D-day.

The solace taken in all this, the dire prognostications by Durden in his article, is that whatever the outcome, my tools described in great detail in Weekly Analytics, should capture most if not all of the ensuing price volatility.

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