Was The December Rally a "Sucker's Rally"?

Man, the stock market is being hammered in the new year…most of my Novemeber-December gains are gone! Was the December rally a true sign of an upturn, or actually a “suckers rally”? By way of explanation, a “Suckers Rally” is a short term burst of market activity, which has been engineered by market-makers to convince the hoi polloi that a geniune rally is underway. These rallies have also been engineered by groups of wealthy investors, who want to liquidate their holdings at a profit (the old “pump and dump” scam). What’s your feeling on this? have we been taken to the cleaners by a bunch of market manipulators? or is the recession ending, and the market about to take off? :smack:

Are there groups of investors with enough wealth to actually “pump and dump” the entire market? I’ve heard of it with one stock, but it seems to me (who admitidly knows very little about the market) like you’d need a lot of capital to drive up, say the Dow Jones, by even one point.

Also, isn’t an end of the year upswing in the market a normal thing? That’s what the guy on NPR said a few weeks ago, anyway.

Well, I don’t know about the whole market…do you have any cites saying the whole market is going tits up? My own impression, strictly based on the performance of my own stocks and money market accounts is that they are doing quite well…even this month. In fact, for the last 4 months I’m up well over 15% on my investments. Of course, this is just ME, so doesn’t really reflect anything about the market as a whole.

I’d be interested in seeing some data that the market is tanking though. Honestly I’ve been too busy to do more than keep an eye on my own little piece of it.

-XT