Replies to post #52388 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[wahz]

JS:

Why do you think they were shorts? Aggressively shorting after this much pull back and right around max pain seems odd.

[JMKel]

Yes! I think we are seeing a lot of market manipulation by the hedge funds. They short QQQ to hold/drive the market down and then cash in on the high beta stocks before they close their short positions they can hedge their shorts by buying puts on QQQ before they drive the market down. When they close QQQ bounces back. They usually do this when the volume drops off as it is much easier to drive the market down on low volume. Yesterday was similar. Very high QQQ volume and sub average volume in many of the individual components of QQQ such as MSFT, INTC and CSCO. The QQQ puts were over 1 all day long while the equity P/C was only about .6-.7.

I smell hedge funds.....