Has the World gone sane?
I was amazed this morning to see both the usual contrarian indicator of a bullish cover on Newsweek (mission accomplished market pumpers) and a good piece of reporting in the Journal on a topic ZeroHedge and I have been pounding the table on for a year. Our readers will find nothing new in the article “This Market Has Its Freq On” but to see it finally summarized in the MSM (giving us no credit at all, of course) is at least a little bit satisfying.
The Journal highlights the following facts (and they are now MSM FACTS, not “conspiracy theories” Tyler and I were making up):
- The recent gains have come with only marginal support from traditional long investors. Wall Street trading desks and the relatively new breed of high-frequency traders have been fueling the rest.
- Investors pumped only $396 million into domestic stock funds in March. Since the start of the year, they’ve only added only $1.8 billion, according to the Investment Company Institute. Compare those inflows with some other recent rallies. Between April and July 2009, investors poured $28.76 billion into U.S. stock funds and in the first three months of 2007 they moved $19.1 billion into such funds.
- Insiders are dumping stock at an alarming pace, $15 billion so far this year, more than six times the $2.5 billion they’ve bought, according to Trim Tabs. Moreover, they’ve been dumping their stock more in recent weeks. Insiders sold $6.9 billion in March and bought just $831 million.
- Six stocks represented 27.51% of the overall stock market volume: American International Group Inc., Ambac Financial Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Popular Inc., Fannie Mae and Citigroup Inc. Since the start of the year they’ve represented 16.55% of the composite volume on the New York Stock Exchange, and more than 22% on each of this week’s first three trading days, reaching as high as 30.62% Tuesday..
- The rise in these stocks has mirrored, or perhaps driven, the recent broader gains. Through Wednesday, Bank of America was up 28.8%, Citigroup was up 48.9%, Ambac shares have doubled, Popular shares are up 74.3% since the start of the year. AIG shares are up 32.5% for the year through Wednesday.
- Program trading represented 27.9% of NYSE volume for the week ended April 2. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG were the three biggest program traders, according to the Big Board.
Wow, if we can just get Uncle Rupert to start calling the…
