Back from a week's vacation in the tropics and freshly infused with sunbaked sanity, we view the stock market's bizarre spasms in recent days as the death rattle of speculators gone criminally berserk with Other People's Money. For how else to reckon the wild price swings of late? On Tuesday, a short squeeze late in the session turned a deathly glum day on the NYSE into one of the most powerful bull rampages of the year, transforming a 120-point loss in the DJIA into a 286-point gain. Yesterday it was the opposite, but with an extra frillip of inspired nuttiness in the final minutes. The Indoos were up nearly 200 points when NYSE traders returned from lunch, but Da Boyz sent shares into a kamikaze dive that wiped out the entire gain and then some in less than an hour. Bush as Greenspan But wait, there's more: With just a half-hour of trading to go, stocks lurched higher yet again, finishing with a 154-point gain. The pundits attributed all of it to a briefing President Bush was conducting for reporters at the Treasury Department. They may be right for once; for, by saying absolutely nothing, Dubya sounded positively Greenspan-esque when he attributed Wall Street's freakish volatility to a 'readjust[ment of] its assessment of risk.' Let's hope the San Andreas Fault does not suffer a similar readjustment any time soon, since, unlike the denizens of Wall Street, Californians do not possess the apparent coping mechanism of mental illness that appears to suit portfolio managers and their soon-to-be victims so well. Just Missed the Top For our part, we can't say we were the least bit surprised by yesterday's histrionics. In fact, a trading recommendation in the Touts section of Wednesday's Rick's Picks came within two ticks of nailing ther exact high
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