Posted at Dealbreaker

The selling over the past few days smacks of panic, yet again. 

Some of this melt-down is forced selling as de-leveraging continues in the realms of the Masters of the Universe.  Some of this selling is due to bear raids that are specifically designed to wreck the financial stocks and force the government to come in and wipe out the equity of bank stock holders.  And some is just sheer panic.

Hedge fund assets under management declined by nearly a trillion dollars last year while $150 billion was withdrawn from hedge funds in December. 

From The Financial Times

Investors pulled close to a net $150bn from hedge funds last month in spite of moves by dozens of funds to halt or suspend redemptions.

From The Telegraph

"They have already hit zero," said Charles de Trenck, a broker at Transport Trackers in Hong Kong. "We have seen trade activity fall off a cliff. Asia-Europe is an unmit­igated disaster."

According to Robert Shiller's 10 year-moving average lagged price/earnings ratio, stocks are inexpensive. From Clusterstock

Consider

From The Big Picture

From The Telegraph, courtesy the always insightful Financial Ninja

The market is making me nervous.  Which means I should be buying.  But is my recognition that I should be buying because the market is making me nervous in fact mean the market is going to go to new lows?  But if getting cautious because I recognize that this is a good buying opportunity because I am nervous mean that the market going to new lows making me even more nervous meaning that the bottom is at hand?  But if the ... (yeah, yeah, we get the idea. - ed.)

The S&P 500 is down 7% over the past four days.  What to do?