Today Shows Just How Thin We Are

Sometimes we get a totally nonsensical day. We used to get these when the market was a lot smaller many years ago -- it seems that one or two accounts are just deciding to get the heck out of the market, and there's no other side of the trade.

What's so amazing is that we are now in one of those markets that is as small as years ago. I think it's possible to take this market down or up with very little buying power, so we have a situation where whoever comes in can crush or raise the market.

Let's put it another way: It could have happened that we opened down big and then rallied.

Nobody ever wants to admit that something doesn't matter. I think that what mattered is that inflation is in retreat, deflation is back, and that's rally material.

It is so easy to craft a scenario where we say, "Looks like oil down is now bad." We can craft a situation that says, "Tech's just terrible because of Dell (DELL - commentary - Cramer's Take)." We can develop a view that today is symbolic of the global retreat in stocks.

Or we can say, "Some big account used the first day of September to leave this tape."

Ten years ago there was an outfit, Renaissance, that would come in at the beginning of a quarter or a month and just annihilate the market. We got a huge number of pundits who would try to puzzle over what happened. It turned out later that there was nothing the matter. It was a huge account getting out.

I used to think that this market had gotten bigger than that. But the market players are shrinking, there's not enough money on the long side to sop up a futures seller or a big liquidator.

We are small and easy to manipulate. That's what happened today.

Random musings: I am seeing the Oil Services HOLDRS (OIH - commentary - Cramer's Take) just being blown to smithereens by short pressure. It is amazing, with no one to blunt it. ... I see stocks being crushed by futures.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.

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