350 points?!

Today's trading in the stock markets revealed an all-too-familiar pattern: huge up and down swings in short periods of time. In the last hour of trading today, Tuesday, October 4, 2011, the NYSE jumped up 350 points! It went from being down 200 to being up 150 in almost the blink of an eye.

This strikes me as manipulation, pure and simple. The big stock brokers on Wall Street have created some really complicated and sophisticated computer trading programs that can trade thousands of shares in a split second, then turn around and sell or buy them again when there is even a minute swing in the share price. The "little guy" like you and me simply can't keep up or compete with that. All you can do is sit there and watch the market swing wildly up and down.

As usual, the computer traders are a few steps ahead of the regulators. But of course now in this country there is this big sentiment that we should not mess with the big banks. What are we, communists? So what if our capitalist masters get insanely rich while bankrupting the rest of the country. Or world. It's free markets. Yet, it's not free markets. The markets are being manipulated, far beyond the reach of us ordinary folks with rapidly disappearing 401k's.

So, good luck with that retirement. You'll need it. I wish I could count on the government stepping in and doing something to help the vast majority of people, but most of them are on the side of Wall Street already. They're all rich already, so screw the little guy.