[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by SportsDino

I call bullshit, it wasn't a day, it was closer to an afternoon, and the precipitious drop itself was all of 20 minutes at most. Thats not investors, that is machines. No amount of group psychology explains that DOW line. And the average investor could give a crap about Greece.

To me it looks like this. People in the know had a clue that is was about time for profit taking (look at the DOW, its at a peak and also all the news is about BP and GS being FUBAR). They come in this morning, overnight trading lopped a good 150 points to start the day, so everyone is in a bad mood to start, and the ones in the know are like, yep time to secure a chunk of that peak that has run its course.

A point hits where more people are pulling out than looking to buy and somehow some indicator in the computers goes south and they decide to sell (it probably was programmed earlier in the week to be ready to exit at a moment's notice). Boom goes the financial dynamite and we all have an interesting phenonmenon to try and figure out.

Yep.

I wonder (idle speculation) what the effect on the market would be if we got rid of all of the computerized trading algorithims like that.