From 1915 to 1969, a period including the 1929 Crash and all those Great Depression years, the trading desk at Filch & Finagle never reported a losing month, probably never a losing day. The Big Five had a cabal going, and it flourished through their ability as "market makers" to get better prices than the counter-parties on every single trade. Sometimes Filch ripped off Goldberg Stixx customers, sometimes Goldberg took Filch customers to the cleaners. That way, nobody had to be seen as looting their own. It was all held together with telephone calls letting cabal dons keep each other in the loop. World class market manipulation comes with a structural design that really does make it them against us, and the crooks have been paying off the Securities and Excuses Commission to keep the us's of the world in the dark about that since Day One.
That said, dons loved their little games, like driving short term prices the wrong way on some big news, taking out margin players who actually did the right thing, and then letting long term trends go where they should've been going all along. Ginormous amounts of money give the unscrupulous all the ammunition they need to pull off terrible things. And that brings us to the month of August.
Noticing that a slew of market participants really did leave their desks for August vacations, the bad guys figured it was easier to screw with prices then than at any other time during the year. Market lore holds that bottoms often, but by no means always, occur in August, and points to the flip side of that as well - the Labor Day turnaround that can lead to that festive Christmas rally.
We're not making a call here, just saying ....
If right, nothing beats a timely market prediction, but in times like these, idle dreams can be lovely too.
