Low stock market trading Monday shows it's "a seller's boycott," Art Cashin told CNBC.
The director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services said "up" volume is "almost 90 percent of the total volume, and that's usually not the way things go."
He added, "Everybody's sitting on their hands, waiting and hoping about the Merkel-Sarkozy meeting (Tuesday), and they may have their hopes a little too high."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nikolas Sarkozy are meeting Tuesday to discuss the euro zone at a time of persistent doubts about Europe's ability to solve its sovereign debtcrisis.
"I think for now they're hoping something can be worked out," Cashin said. "It’s a strange kind of co-dependence going on in Europe. The Germans may rail about it but they can’t afford to get out of a weak currency, otherwise their economy could collapse."
Cashin said he sees parallels between current market conditions and the market crash of October 1987.
"What we’ve seen [in the market last week] were some classic selling climaxes and what we’re seeing [Monday] is a rebound," he said. "But if you go back to the disproportionality of the 1987 crash, we rebounded 6 percent the next day, 10 percent the day after that, and by December we were headed back to another low in light volume. So you want to be very careful here."
WATCH:Cashin on what investors can expect for the markets for the remainder of the week.
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Disclosures:
Disclosure information was not available for Art Cashin or his company.