lots of contracts being traded at the end of the day is not an unusual event.
For every buyer, there was someone willing to sell, what it doesn't say below is what date or what kind of price move was made at that point or what news had been released at that point. IT also doesn't say what kind of move followed and whether this was out of ordinary. I could post up some charts if the date was clear.
Also - I think it's important to remember which is the dog & which is the tail here. The S&P and DOW are simply indices of stocks. The e-mini S&P Futures and the mini Dow Futures are futures contracts based on the delivery of cash of the future value of those indices. Right now, most are trading June contracts. No-one takes delivery of the cash - you just roll into the next contract period.
Anyway - the DOW Index is definitely the dog - not the futures.
As these are effectively bets on the DOW & S&P - it is still the STOCKS that are the market. It is extremely rare to see the futures & index go out of line - when they do, arbitrageurs come in & make a killing. Of course the futures trade almost 24 hours from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon, and the stocks don't, so futures do move outside of the market.
100,000 long futures contracts costs you very little. Let's say $2.00 per contract commission (probably less at those volumes) = $200,000. Depending on the broker - you need margin on account of perhaps $500 per contract (again probably less at those volumes) = $50,000,000 margin. For every point the S&P moves in your favour you'd gain $50 = $5,000,000 per point. S&P has a range of 10-100 points per day.
So - basically someone with $50Million placed a bet of $5 million per point on the futures - this is big money to me - but not a great deal for George Soros.
During market hours, if you wanted to move the market - wouldn't the best way be to wait for a quiet time & start buying up the components of the DOW ? there's only 30 stocks there but it's considered to be yardstick by which people gauge the markets.
Also - if this is government intervention, it does imply that someone in the US govt is more savvy than the quants & traders out there that make a living out of this. My guess is that if the US Govt made a trade like this, they'd have their pants pulled down & their asses spanked very quickly.
Or perhaps the US Government has financial people that are smarter than those in private banks & hedge funds...
