A Skeptical Look at the Selling

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Could the capitulation have occurred in the after-hours? Could all of that Sun (SUNW Quote) sold at 62 and Motorola (MOT Quote) at 120 and Intel (INTC Quote) at 75 be the bottom? The Microsoft (MSFT Quote) 107 trade or the Nortel (NT Quote) 76 print? Nasty merchandise all.

Or are these buoyant stock futures this morning and the anemic but positive returns in Europe and Asia just having some fun with us, and Bloody Friday will simply precede Black Monday and, wishful thinking, Turnaround Tuesday?

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Lucent (LU) Call me suspicious. The trading in after-hours last night was huge. Oracle (ORCL Quote), for one, was trading madly at the 89 level, hundreds of thousands of shares.

As Jeff and I manned the Lucent (LU Quote) call, our traders kept being offered more Oracle. As much as we wanted to get in the heads of the sellers to figure out how Lucent connected with Oracle -- knee bone/leg bone? -- we couldn't. So we bought.

That kind of panic selling has historically marked bottoms. The problem, however, is that last year, history was bunk. I don't know why history should necessarily start coming into play now.

In past years, I have written about the beauty of waiting for the crescendo when everyone who wants to sell has a chance to. It would be terrific for the bulls if that crescendo truly occurred at 5:30 last night when we discovered that the Lucent problem was really not one of demand.

But I don't think enough people were around to sell. I don't trust it yet.

Call me skeptical.

Random musings: The site rocked last night. My personal faves: Herb on Olstein and accounting and Jim S. on what was really strong with Lucent. One saved you a fortune; the other could make you one. And for those of you who have emailed me in the past, you know my highest compliment, which I now extend to the editors and writers who worked so hard to keep us up last night on this real deal: well done.