Herding

Listening to Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Surveillance. He says that retail discount broker (Etrade, Ameritrade, etc...) trading volume is up while institutional (GS, JPM, etc...) volume is down. This means that us mom & pop, individual, little guys are trying to cash in on this rally while the big dogs are standing off. It also means that this is only a bear market rally, and not the big turnaround.

The little guys are usually the suckers in a trend, by the way.



I wonder how you get access to those volume numbers, get a Bloomberg? I'll have to ask him.

Some notes:

"...this is not the broad institutional endorsement that you see at the end of bear markets and at the beginning of bull markets."

"Mike Santoli (from Barrons): This is an unwiding of the panic selloff that we saw January, February, March. And it's now put us at a place where the heavy lifting is going to begin."

He supports a Chrysler bankruptcy as the price of free market capitalism, and the same should be applied to the banks.

The stress tests are ineffective, not 'stressful' enough:
"...it's going to take more cash to get them to the proper amount of leverage, and more sale of assets that are way under water."

"When people are talking about green shoots.. it's not that things are getting better, it's that things are getting worse at a slower rate."