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This is juicy with a twist of underpaid over worked intern/employee scorned. My long time thought is there are several layers making non-public moves to protect and insulate some cash all the way through the chain. Financial, legal, political. This is so much bigger than a few stocks or a margin call. That’s why all this DD on technicals and timing are like throwing darts at a wall. There are too many variables that people will never see. In summer 2008, the market was weird. It had been in weird for 2.5 years at that point, coming from a shorted and destroyed public home builder IR team, to managing a mega cap retail company IR department. But July and Aug 2008 felt different. More trading and movement than a typical summer. Lots more incoming calls than usual. A week before Lehman and Bear collapsed, the analysts covering us had to let go of most their teams. The day they fell, they were walked out of their offices. A few months later BAML fired their entire San Francisco equity and research office. Our analyst was skiing with his kids and was fired on the chairlift. No bonus nothing. Never even got to go back to his office. They couriered his belongings. Stocks fell and skidded, and then tumbled some more. To give you an idea C was at $1.30, SBUX was at $7.50, MSFT was at $14, DOW was at $6. Everyone was dumping everything they had. The more they sold and liquidated, the more it declined. Smart people with a little stomach and grit started to buy these deep discounts. They bought and held. It did not recover overnight. It took some stocks longer than others. None of it was based on fundamentals. It was based on fear and economic collapse and wealth transfer from the middle class that pumps discretionary spending into the economy to the wealthy and the connected that doesn’t. Ask yourself this, how in a pandemic when everything was closed are major companies in nearly every sector at 52-week highs? Valuation? Future Earnings when many companies have pulled back on guidance given the uncertainty? Nope no possible way. Offsetting hedges on short positions? Maybe. It makes far more logical sense. I follow a basket of about 60 stocks I know extremely well over a breadth of sectors and sizes. The only ones not near their 52-week or even 104-week high are massively shorted stocks. That go up and down and then list along. All the DD in the world will never account for the stuff quietly underway through our entangled financial system. Just buy and hodl. That is the retail investor influence. It is the easiest role. Patience. Edit: Adding clarification and a reminder the type of bottom feeders we are dealing with. Why was the no bonus a big deal? Because salaries are typically only a small portion of analyst wages. The super majority of their compensation is paid in their bonus based on metrics met throughout the previous year...paid out at the end of the year. BAML closed the office as a RIF two days before the bonus pay out to avoid paying it, while collecting their bailout hand out from the government.