We’ve certainly had some interesting action over the last week or so. From listening to TV (CNBC) you’d swear the market’s been getting crushed, but the major indices are right where they were eight days ago. The NASDAQ has been stick in a very tight range.

I think the choppiness is frustrating a lot of people and many of them seem to be placing the blame on hedge funds. It seem like every hour CNBC has somebody on who’s talking about some hedge fund(s) that’s supposedly blowing up. The most popular rumor is that some funds were short GM stock and long GM bonds and have gotten crushed by that trade. Those rumors seem to be creating a bit of a buyers strike as nobody wants to step into/ahead of forced liquidation(s). There’s also something going on in the commodities. Duru sent me the following message yesterday which sums it up pretty well:

Some serious drama building in energy and commodity stocks. You might want to consider posting the charts of some because they tell some fascinating stories, short and long-term: VLO, CVX, RIO, NEM (short-term fugly, long-term up-trend from 2000 still in place!), PD, CRS, etc…

You can tell the hedgies and traders are using and abusing these stock en masse because so many of these things look very similar from a technical standpoint.

Like he said, there are some really ugly charts in those sectors. Perhaps all those people on CNBC are looking at the action in those sectors. What was really interesting to me was the fact that oil got crushed yesterday but the stock market also went down. Stocks had been trading opposite oil for the last several days but something changed yesterday.