Nov 11: Veterans' Day trade

With apologies to the discerning reader about the vague, content-less title of this post, I shall proceed into just as disjointed a data dump of some of the day's action.

First, a DJIA component had a veritable repeat of May 6th's Flash Crash in the final minutes of today's trade. Here are the smouldering remains:



I haven't yet seen any headline explaining the precipitous decline. [Addendum: Poor headline earnings numbers were the catalysts. The conf. call, which could either fortify the bears or spur on the bulls, is presently ongoing, as of 4:45p EST]. And vertiginous it certainly was: the $35.15 nadir marked a near-instant erasing of all gains since October 25. Put another way, the volatility of the last hour (i.e. the size of the hour's bar on a candlestick chart) exceeds that of any hour-long period in the past 180 sessions.

Second, take a look at XOM, no mere minnow given its status as largest market cap firm (per my possibly imperfect recollection) in the modest marketplace that is Wall Street. Dizzying, seemingly irrational, propelled by ask-questions-later fast fingers: the Exxon chart bears resemblance to that of DIS. Yet the direction is opposite. And how interesting that the curiously anthropomorphic psychology of markets can create a bipolar-eque bifurcation of emotion in two sister-stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average! (Granted, the time frame of the respective moves is dissimilar.) The chart follows:



I cannot omit the most important anomaly of today's trade: CSCO. A DJIA component too, the networking maker plunged 16 percent on a cut in its sales forecast; the chart follows:



As for the broad market, /ES printed 1211.5 at high noon in Anchorage, which corresponded to settlement of the S&P500 at approximately 1214, a change of -0.4%. The DJIA ended at 11283 (down 0.7%) -- and weighed down by CSCO and DIS -- while the NASDAQ closed at 2556 (down 0.9%).