Bad Close, Worse Aftermarket

by Chris
What a day!
With a real battle going on between the VIX sellers and futures buyers on one side and the cash sellers on the other.
Up down, down up, on and on.
The Dow futures went as high as 25,239 at one point after being some 735 points lower early in the morning
A final burst beginning just  after 3:30 p.m. seemed to have the jammers/bulls in charge.  But then the market-on-close sell order came flooding in and the Dow futures finished down some 500 points from their intraday high.

That was a very wild ride from safely green to red.  Volatility is proving to be difficult to contain, and making that especially true is that liquidity is awful.  The computers are still staying away which means, predictably, that when you allow 90% of your “”market”” to become nothing but algos playing with each other, the risk is that they all go away when things are “out of parameter.”
Moving along, oil and energy had a pretty bad day:

That’s a pretty strong shellacking for oil.  Not a good sign for the energy complex here.
Metals got mauled a bit too, but gold went down less than the S&P 500 futures and way less than Dr Copper who got really clocked for a nearly 3% loss on the day.

Between oil and Copper one could be forgiven for raising some questions about the strength fo the alleged global recovery and if, perhaps, there weren’t a recession risk lurking out there?
Too soon to make that connection, but falling oil and copper is a warning sign.  Usually.
Finally, this was a “sell everything, Mortimer!” kind of day, also raising questions.
Most notably, bonds fell too:

As I said.  This isn’t over yet.