Farrell: Fat Thumb, Black Swan, or Just the Fickle Finger of Fate?
Chief Investment Officer, Soleil Securities
For the market to plunge 1000 or so points and then rebound a good bit of the way back is rattling.
Stories abound. My favorite as of 5.40 PM is that someone at a major broker had a "fat thumb" and hit billion on a sell order instead of million. Another broker was said to dump 1.9 million shares of Procter & Gamble, causing the stock to fall from almost $62 to $39 and back to $62 in minutes. The ten-year Treasury fell from a 3.8% yield to 3.3% and back. And if you had gone to Starbucks for a mid-afternoon latte (aside from napping, one of my favorite things to do), you would have missed it.
Maybe it was a black swan, a once-in-a-century occurrence. Or maybe it just was.
There will be a lot of coverage and investigation to try to figure what went on. I have no idea, but if the system is open to accidental shocks, then we have to close the holes. But we have been saying the market was overextended and a correction was overdue. (The problem is we have been saying that for a while.) Whatever. We are where we are, and this is shaping up to be a buying opportunity.
I would guess, and it is just that, a guess, that the market over the next little bit will "fill in" the downside gap. But the problems around the world are known. Greece is a disaster, but it's a 2.5%-of-Europe's-GDP disaster. The proposed bailout isn't half of what AIG cost. And there are solutions. Restructuring!!!! The ECB has to gather its (nit)wits and step into the bond market with a good dose of quantitative easing.
And we all have to calm the hell down and remember Sunday is Mother's Day.
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Vincent Farrell, Jr. is chief investment officer at Soleil Securities Group and a regular contributor to CNBC.
