I don’t even know what to say that I haven’t already said over the last couple of weeks. Like Dr. Brett said last night the “normal historical indicators of market bottoms are broken”. I think Dylan Ratigan had it right tonight on ‘Fast Money’ when he said the market is crashing. Because of the modern market’s circuit breakers we’ll probably never see a one-day 20% drop like we had in 1987. But we’ve had a 5-day period that’s just as bad, if not worse as any 5 days around the 1987 crash without having a single halt in trading. It’s like a slow motion, controlled crash.

As you’ll see in the charts below the indices have fallen between 25% and 35% since the SEC restricted short selling on financial stocks three weeks ago. So much for that plan.

Here’s the VIX:

Trend Table

No changes

Trend Nasdaq S&P 500 Russell 2000
Long-Term Down Down Down
Intermediate Down Down Down
Short-term Down Down Down

(+) Indicates an upward reclassification today
(-) Indicates a downward reclassification today
Lat Indicates a Lateral trend

*** I’m simply using the indices’ relations to their 200, 50 and 10-day moving averages to tell me the long, intermediate and short-term trends, respectively.