It's not just the majors...it's all of them. The reason? The explosion of ETFs. They are required by mandate to own all shares of stocks represented in their respective indexes by proportion to their standing within each index. So, that means a lot of dogs that aren't worth owning. Collectively, the ETFs have been allowed to own many multiples of phantom shares that don't actually exist. If all the shares claimed by all the ETFs were actually "sold," there wouldn't be enough outstanding shares to cover the trades. This is one of the scariest truths about the markets today, that no one talks about.

Another source of market manipulation is the proliferation of institutional trading in the futures markets. Futures contracts, by their very nature, are highly leveraged. Couple that with the fact that the institutional traders make bets on margin, with relatively small amounts of their own actual money, and this represents another house of cards. Borrowing money to trade a speculative instrument that is already leveraged...