StockViz

In interviews with more than two dozen fund managers, bankers and traders, no clear cause emerged for the plunge in price. Market players were unable to identify any single bank or fund orchestrating a massive sale to liquidate positions, not even an errant trade that triggered panic selling, as seen in the equities flash crash last May.

Rather, the picture pieced together from interviews on Thursday and Friday is one of a richly priced commodities market — raw goods have been on a five-month winning tear over all other major investment classes — hit by a flurry of negative factors that individually could be absorbed but cumulatively triggered a maelstrom.

Computerized trading kicked in when key price levels were reached, accelerating the fall.

“It was a domino effect,” said Dominic Cagliotti, a New York-based oil options broker.

via Special report: What really triggered oil’s greatest rout | Reuters.

“The reality of risk is much less simple and straightforward than the perception. People vastly overestimate their ability to recognize risk and underestimate what it takes to avoid it; thus, they accept risk unknowingly and in so doing contribute to its creation.

“Risk arises as investor behavior alters the market. Investors bid up assets, accelerating into the present appreciation that otherwise would have occurred in the future, and thus lowering prospective returns. And as their psychology strengthens and they become bolder and less worried, investors cease to demand adequate risk premiums. The ultimate irony lies in the fact that the reward for taking incremental risk shrinks as more people move to take it.

via Hussman Funds – Weekly Market Comment: The Menu – May 9, 2011.

There is a growing trend of market pundits hopping on to Twitter to spread their favourite stock picks. StockViz has collated tweets since the April of this year and put together a leader-board of sorts. The largest twitterer was StocksTips, with a whopping 3140 tweets:

With “India Shining” and all, is it any wonder that most of them were “buys”?

And lastly the sells:

To the active investor, the question is how many of them foretold the most recent market rout? The leader-board for the number of sells after April 25^th:

Happy twittering!

the most likely reason for day’s sell-off was, simply, that a sell-off was due

via FT Alphaville » What drove the commodities rout?.

A bloody day across the commodities complex in pictures.

FT Alphaville » Rout.