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No time to devote to a full blast at Mr Hankie and Bernanke and their recent hanky-panky; sorry.
I've been slowly dismantling all of my beloved Flex implementations of nifty things (Portfolio Manager and WatchList, but also Calendars, Breadth Summary, Index Analysis WorkBench and Stock Workbench) due to the need to remedy a security issue that prevents users from being able to use these gizmos if they inadvertently leave off the 'www' from the domain name.
It's a very sensible protocol (Adobe embedded it in Flex - and believe me, Flex is absolutely da bomb.) The end result though, is that www.marketmentat.com and marketmentat.com are seen by Flex as two different domains, and if you insist on 'samedomain' in the script settings, a SWF file can't call scripts which use relative references if they are called from a page that doesn't have the 'www' prefix.
Anyway - the upshot of it is, I am too tired to turn my brain to today's decline in US markets - except to say that a decline did not look at all likely leading into the last hour.Then at about 3:15 NY time, somebody spooked the horses.
And as we all know, it can't have been the short-sellers, because their lives have recently been made a misery.
Actually - on the subject of short sellers... when I was playing around with my nifty Short Interest analysis gizmo I noticed an interesting thing: short interest on the ASX - as a proportion of the aggregate market cap of shortable stocks (which is almost the same size as the agregate market cap of the All Ords) - has been falling for the whole of the last year.
In fact, it has fallen faster than the ASX200 - aggregate short interest as a proportion of market capitalisation is down by 84% over the past year.
A year ago it was a 'whopping' 1.2% or thereabouts, and as of last week it was about 0.22%.
So let's get this sorted out - the ASX would have you believe that a part of the market action that has been declining as a proportion of activity, is actually the cause of - or a major contributor to - the recent weakness in Australian equities.
What ABSOLUTE HOGWASH.
What charlatans these people are. What absolute bullshit artists. What shysters, scam artists and frauds.
Anyway - here is the chart: compiled with data straight from the ASX.
Just think - there should be a site where you can subscribe for, say, $4 a week, which lets you analyse short interest by individual stock, by sector index, and gives you a choice of several different bases of comparison amongst stocks.
Oh wait... there is. And once I get these Flex apps rejigged to detect their launch domain (and append or remove the 'www' accordingly), we will be cooking with gas.
But let's peruse the picture that tears the ASX's "Shorts are Satan's Bedfellows" story for once and for all. I haven't overlaid a chart of the All Ords for the same periods, but it's easy enough to do (in fact it is a default setting in the chart segment of the Flex version)
If you have any contacts in the media, point out to them that any decent analysis of short interest blows a hole in the ASX's case.
