Today does not mean anything, the market was incredibly oversold, right at the 3 standard deviations on a 60 day regression channel. Bounces can happen at any time when you get to that type of an extreme. It is my opinion that the PPT (Plunge Protection Team was at work here) When you see buy programs come out of the blue in the futures in the last hour on a day like this (about 200 points of today came in the last hour), that is the PPT working. Once you get used to watching market action closely, it is easy to see when they show up. I actually used to have a few day trading strategies designed around trying to front run their action.

For those not familiar with this terminology, this refers to the group of insiders that are “urged” by certain people to buy to stop things from freefalling. I learned about this from a friend who used to run a huge mutual fund in NY a few years back. It also can be the Fed working its magic through others without actually doing anything themselves. If they could pull off another day like today, the heat would be taken off the Fed, so it would not be a surprise to see it happen.

I agree with most others here, that it is unlikely the Fed will do anything. Kramer is all over the place hedging his opinions, and I doubt Bernanke cares what he thinks.