Trader Mike

What an end to a wild and historic week! Yet for all the volatility the indices ended near flat for the week. The Nasdaq finished the week up 0.56% while the S&P 500 was up just 0.27%. In yesterday’s watchlist I gave a warning to “be careful out there”. Shortly after the open I posted an update which said:

Update @ 9:35 — Seriously, be really careful out there today. I’m seeing all kind of strange spikes both up & down. BBY just spiked up to 80, CMCSA spiked down to 0.01.

That’s exactly why I was saying be careful. Panic moves seem to overwhelm the system and strange things happen. My broker IM’ed clients about the exchanges sending bad quotes and many bloggers wrote about having technical issues. While I’m sure the person who sold CMCSA for a penny got their broker to break (invalidate) that trade it would have been better to avoid that situation in the first place. If you have to enter an order in a fast market like that, especially on an open you’d better use a limit order. Anyway, here are some charts with some nutty spikes from yesterday:

Yesterday ORCL was showing a low of $0.01 just like CMCSA. While it appears that the data has been corrected (and the trades broken?) for CMCSA, ORCL is still showing an extreme spike down to $14.56. More unintended consequences brought to you by the Plunge Protection Team (PPT). Hopefully the folks who got hurt on those bad trades will be made whole.

Here are Novell, Franklin Resources and Charles Schwab:

I got an answer from StockCharts.com about their QQQQ data but I’m still not happy!

Did the QQQQ really hit its 200 DMA yesterday??? Some charts say yes, others say no.

There’s an interesting divergence between the QQQ and NDX today, but I think it’s actually because of what happened yesterday. Those two instruments track the same stocks, but yesterday the NDX was down 2.97% while the QQQ was down 3.94%. So it looks like some arbitrageurs have stepped in today to snatch a nice quick profit. As I write this the QQQ is up about 0.5% while the NDX is down 1%. How could this happen? My guess is that there was a bit of panic in the QQQ yesterday and it just got pushed down too far. This was free money for those quick enough to catch it. Reminds me of …