I get it. It wasn't actually Buffett, since we're no where near the bottom of this Bear you've called, and Warren would also know this to. It's the frustrated and restricted portfolio managers on Wall Street finding a safe port in the storm. Got it!

Do you think the 10-yr Treasury Auction at 1pm ET also had something to do with it? Maybe it at least explains the brief spike in bonds just before 1pm, before the selloff in bonds continued minutes later.

Bill,

Good Morning!

Excellent detective work!

Warren, our premier capitalist, is the man. He ignores the minutiae of the market and buys into fear and sells into euphoria.

It's momentum and speculation; however, the more educated the player is to the vagaries of the markets, the higher the percentage for success.

Correction for my last comment:

Looking at the chart for TLT, it sold off the hour before 1pm, then rallied for a few minutes starting at 1pm, then resumed its downtrend. So that explains the action around 1pm.

Bill,

Metals - Platinum and Palladium stocks:

http://goldandsilverstocks.blogspot.com/2006/04/palladium-ethanol-stocks.html

Might be excellent buy soon..? (when the correction is over..)

http://cmd-chart.blogspot.com/2006/06/platinum-palladium-futures.html

I also just realized that on Thursday people started rolling over from the June to the September index futures contracts. I don't know if that has anything to do with the V-shape market action that day. Maybe someone thought it was an opportune time to go long relatively safe stocks and open new short positions in the Sept. equity index futures? Wild guess.

Berkshire Hathaway didn't start to rise until almost 2:00 pm yesterday, and then its rise was feable in comparison to other stocks. Your claim that stocks known to be in Buffet's portfolio all "lifted off" as the same time is also doubtful according to what I see on the on minute java charts at Bigcharts.com.

Everyone is concerned right now, we are all trying to understand and figure out why and what to do. We best do this in a calm state of mind. Be gentle in our working this out. Please.

Bill;
I think you're over reacting here a little. I enjoy reading your posts too. I know that you did not state that Birkshire "rocketed" at 11:55. But you seemed to be implying that big money had determined that Birkshire was the place to be. I am pointing out that any inflows to Birksire seemed to be much later and that it didn't lift the shares very much.
Also, I know that you didn't say that every Buffet stock rose at the same time. However, how about another look at the first two stocks, namely American Express and Alcoa. You gave a thumbs up to APX and a thumbs down to AA.
Hey, you say it was late at night. I can understand that. I'm not trying to hold you to some impossible standard or to any standard at all, for that matter. I'm just expressing my opinion that the pattern you claim to exist, may not be there. Did you want just all "yes" replys?

I think one has to be very careful when red boarding an event. There are 100's of plausible explanations for events, after the fact.

When you try and apply them in realtime, forget it.

The only theories that matter are the ones that are predictive, the rest is noise.

Let's call this kind of thing rational speculation, and not an explanation.

Let's call the "Buffet intervention" a hypothesis, and not a theory.

A theory is predictive, and all Bill has posited is a correlation, and a hypothetical explanation.

Kudos on the observation, BTW. Should it happen a few more times, one might make an argument, and even a prediction. But until then, it's just a tidy explanation.

Yes, its a model of what happened on Thursday, but what more do we have? Everything is a model and it's not Bill's responsibility to do our homework. Its our money and our responsibility. I, for one, appreciate the unique perspective in this blog. It allows me to research avenues that I would not have thought of myself (at least not nearly as quickly). I don't see anyone proposing a better model, so if you are going to criticize, let's hear your model and just exactly how it mirrors reality more accurately than Mr. Cara's. Criticism of this blog's author without construct is looking a gift horse in the mouth.

For the record, I began following BRK two weeks ago as a defensive play. The model makes sense to me.