Who ever said DaBoyz don't have a sense of humor? Even those of us who were on the wrong side of the trade got a good laugh yesterday when Citi shares went bonkers on word that the subprime mortgage debacle and a few related problems had cost the banking colossus nearly $6 billion in the last quarter. The news was out before the bell, allowing DaBoyz to do what they do best: i.e., plunder and sodomize panicky traders in the first few minutes of the day, before the victims knew what hit 'em. The pros deftly pulled their bids as Citi began to trade, causing the stock to plunge 80 cents as market orders that had accumulated overnight were matched to a relative handful of buy orders well below Friday's settlement price. At that point, DaBoyz were just getting their beaks wet. The instant the selling dried up they sprang a new trap, this time on the bears. With selling exhausted, shorts began to cover, only to discover there were no offers other than a sprinkling of limit orders that had gone unfilled on the way down. This precipitated a short-squeeze so vicious that Citi was actually up 25 cents on the day before the session was barely ten minutes old. Spin This, Pal... Now, this was a quite impressive trick: running a stock sharply higher on news of a $6 billion quarterly loss. There was no way the announcement could have been interpreted positively, either. Citi's profits will be down an estimated 60% from a year earlier, with write downs of $1.4 billion for LBO-type activity, $1.3 billion for mortgage-backed securities, $600 for credit-trading losses and $2.6 billion for consumer credit losses and future reserves. With all those bad numbers, it's plain to see that it could only have
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