My first instinct is to call Bullshit on the “market error”. But real or not, this day will wipe people out of the markets.

We bought a few of our holdings as they were plunging and stopped a few too. But the vast majority of my portfolio is way above my stop points and I want to buy–not sell–at the right price.

If this “error” is real then there must be new rules governiing HFT. If not, this will happen frequently…

buying Paragon Shipping Inc. [[prgn]] and Alcoa Inc. [[aa]]

Todays action shows just how fragile the house of cards really is. The engineered rally, the royal scam, is only as good as the market manipulators are in the defense of their handiwork.

Today is history boys and girls. The great reflation experiment came completely unwould in half and hour. They’ll try to pick up the pieces, but today is the mini-crash heard round the world…

We had ignored Europe throughout their melting. We even ignored China’s raising of rates and bank capital requirements. I think this is about something else.

We warned about how the government giveth and taketh away, remember? Today there are serious rumblings about auditing the FED. No matter how much we say we want it, we really don’t. Market participant are scared shitless of being found out. It will hurt confidence and could cause a run on the banks.

This is less about over there and more about over here. We can complain about the engineered rally and benign government and free money because it seems unfair. But this is the alternative.

We are fast approaching the 50% retracment mark for most of the major indices coming from the February lows. The risk on/risk off trade continues to extremes.

I am actually looking for a little melt-down to buy some stuff. Right at this moment it is too difficult to step in front of the falling knife. All the worrying and the warnings that were not believed are now feared with great ferocity.

Let’s see where we end the week. I bet there will be some buying late tomorrow and into Monday if Europe doesn’t sink into the sea…

ADDENDUM:

WE ARE NOW AT THE 50% RETRACEMENT OF THE ENTIRE MOVE FROM THE FEBRUARY LOWS.  But the markets are in wholesale selling overload. Just let it happen…LOOK at Defensive’s if you must but the knife continues to fall…

AN EXCERPT:

The European problems are quickly coming to a head and there will almost certainly be workout or defaults along the line of what happened to the South American defaults of the 1980’s. The culmination will probably be an exchange of the current debt for new debt instruments along the lines of the Brady Bonds. Sure, some investors will get stiffed and some banks will have to take some losses, but they’ll just change the rules. European banks will simply segregate and hide their losses just like we do here. Problem solved and we can go about our version of extend and pretend and get back to the matter at hand—the eternal stimulus and fighting deflation with inflation.