Futures Sellers Had No Crystal Ball

So many times I have seen days like Thursday where there's not a buyer in sight, not one. Stocks sink under their own weight. There are cascades, just waves, of selling. No buyers at all.

And I start to wonder, "What happened? Where are the bids? Is it just happening too fast to get buyers down? Has something happened that we don't know about?"

Of course, it turns out that nothing has happened at all and that the buyers have just walked away while the sellers pressed and pressed.

Then you get days like today, as if nothing happened yesterday. It's just nutty.

I have a theory about why it happens: The bears just made it happen with futures selling. The futures overwhelmed the market and, because the common stock buyers don't know that, they pull their bids and don't take advantage of the declines.

When the market comes in overnight and it turns out that the sellers knew nothing and that the futures selling was not backed up by selling of common shares, these same people who walked away in fear come back into the market with a vengeance and pay up -- when they wouldn't have had to.

The buying's not uniform. Many stocks are rebounding much less than they fell (NYSE Euronext (NYX - commentary - Cramer's Take), anyone?). I don't trust it because I don't know when the motivated sellers are going to come back and I don't like that the same stocks go higher and the financials don't.

Yet, in the end, once again, intraday buying worked better than my caution.

Just didn't think that the sellers were all futures.

I just got that wrong.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long NYSE Euronext.

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Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. Outside contributing columnists for TheStreet.com and RealMoney.com, including Cramer, may, from time to time, write about stocks in which they have a position. In such cases, appropriate disclosure is made. To see his personal portfolio and find out what trades Cramer will make before he makes them, sign up for Action Alerts PLUS. Watch Cramer on "Mad Money" weeknights on CNBC. Click here to order Cramer's latest book, "Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich," click here to order his book, "Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World," click here to get his second book, "You Got Screwed!" and click here to order Cramer's autobiography, "Confessions of a Street Addict." While he cannot provide personalized investment advice or recommendations, he invites you to send comments on his column by clicking here.

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