The RO Report, "Orderly Panic" Edition

I have to say that for all the pictures you'll see tomorrow of aggrieved traders, and even with the $VIX spiking to its highest level since its inception, it didn't feel too panicky out there.

Also, the fact that the market rallied 400 points on even the hint of a rumor about a special G8 meeting, is laughable. In fact, the market was so orderly today on the downside, that I'm starting to get the awful feeling that we'll need to get below 8500 on the Dow before this is all over. That's just my feeling... no lines or anything to give me that number... it's just where I think shit would be really, really scary.

The best case scenario, from a trading standpoint, didn't happen today. Had we pinned ourselves to the lows at the close, down over 1000 points or something, and set ourselves up for a little more of a wash tomorrow morning, I feel we could have made a bottom. It would have been perfect. Europe and all the overseas markets would get crushed again, we would have gapped down tomorrow, sold the first hour and then bounced. Just after we started to bounce, the FED could come in and cut 50bp and we would have had a 600 point rally.

The end of day rally today muddied that scenario a bit and I'm not sure what to think now going forward. I think we have, yet again, forestalled the inevitable.

It wasn't a classic day for the RO. There was good money made, but also some heavy losses. At no time today was it "easy" to make money and every trader... even Trader D, visited the dark side today at some point. In fact, Trader D was down close to $30,000 at one point.

Out of 26 traders today, 19 were gross positive, or 73%. That's good, but given all the movement today, I'm surprised it wasn't better. Still, the "bosses" reclaim the top position... the RO was nicely positive today overall. 12 traders finished up over $1,000 gross. I was #10 of 26.

Here are today's Bosses:

1. Trader D, $107,836 on 738k shares traded.
2. Trader C, $30,088 on 579k shares traded.
3. Trader Z, $14,564 on 377k shares traded.
4. Trader E, $8,974 on 147k shares traded.
5. Trader L, $5,587 on 114k shares traded.

And the Manservants:

1. Trader F, -$27,081 on 185k shares traded.
2. Trader K, -$23,121 on 362k shares traded.
3. Trader A, -$11,797 on 556k shares traded.
4. Trader N, -$4,656 on 46,000 shares traded.
5. Trader V, -$1,617 on 59,500 shares traded.

Get good sleep tonight. But before you close your eyes on the day, give us your thoughts on what will happen tomorrow over in the comment section.

NOTE: Volume on the NYSE was under 2 billion shares today. That seems light given the action. I don't think we've seen the bottom.