https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=HfT That's really the only one you need. One of the guys I follow, can't remember which one, pointed out that Jerome Powell is on the record as arguing that recessions are a normal part of the market cycle. This is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that what goes up must come down but from a Capitalist standpoint it's deepest heresy. Even Bernanke saw it as his duty to pop the bubble with the least bloodshed; neither Yellen nor Powell faint at the sight of blood. The real problem is you can't inflate a bubble forever, it will pop at some point and Bernanke was so terrified of the Great Depression that he pumped up the banks like Macy's balloons. Eventually the air has to come out. And then people freak out. Fitting curves to chaos only allows you to backtest your math. The problem with math and markets is that we can only suss out what factors matter after the fact. I think David Rosenberg pointed out last week that nobody rings a bell at the top of the market and that while it may be obvious in retrospect, in the moment you have no more assurance as to the next day as you do to the provenance of a coin toss.It'd be fun to cross-correlate buybacks with the nasdaq, spx, fed interest rates, categories of debt per capita, etc.
And what do you think, 'bl00, is Trump right to blame the fed, to some degree, for the poor market performance this week?
The graph suggests that we should fit some exponential decay factor (with a peak near 1982), and implies we're just as sensitive to fed interest rates crashing "the market" as we were in 1957 or so.