This is written by a man who actually WORKED IN THE FIELD -- he had first hand experience of an "unseen hand" moving the Market:

WARNING: The following is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.

A couple of days ago, in the forum, with regard to the October put options, I wrote:
These puts might just be an automated hedge strategy by large institutions. With the DOW near a record it makes sense. They might be trying to have their cake and eat it too. They might want to stay in to catch more upside, but they know there's a (possibly strong) chance of decline. What do They do?

They stay long, but they buy a bit of insurance with the put options.
Guys, I'm the first one to say that I DON'T KNOW where the thing is going today, tomorrow or next week. And I put that warning at the top of messages like this because I don't want you to take action based only on my analysis, if you can call it analysis. If I had more confidence in making calls in the market, I'd be trading the damn thing myself, and we'd have more solar panels on our roof than anyone else in the district. And a wind turbine. A big one! And a hot house to grow tomatoes in the winter, and, and...

Now, that I've told you that I have no idea what's going to happen, and with the Dow at a record high, let's examine the Short Squeeze.

This is the most incredible move of them all, in my opinion. When lots of traders and pundits start to believe "the top is in / it's coming down" they short everything, like Fred Hickey.

When so many people get short, it doesn't take much to shake them out of their positions and actually cause a strong (temporary) rally! All They have to do to cause a massive short covering rally is to start buying index futures, in a sustained way, for a few minutes and * boom * it's on. Many shorts will yield to the "unseen hand of the market" and cover their positions. It only takes a couple of hundred million leveraged dollars to touch off one of these moves. I've seen it happen dozens of times. TR and I used to have this radar thing scanning the market, looking for "weird" momentum, among other things. A couple of times, we got alarms on nearly the entire NASDAQ 100 and lots of lower tiered relatives.

Once, TR yelled out, "What the hell happened!?"

I said, "The 'unseen hand of the market' just just slapped everyone across the face and said, 'I own this show.'"

The clinical term for this is buy program (or sell program) and if you have a way of visualizing the market, like we did, it's an awe inspiring thing. Most of the time, the market looks mostly like semi-random noise. Sometimes, you get more up trending noise. Sometimes, more down trending noise. Occasionally, though, nearly all of the money goes mostly one way or the other. These are the times when the wizard behind the curtain (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, etc.) starts pulling the big levers.

Now, why didn't we make money? Sadly, we couldn't determine how long the "programs" would last. We'd try to catch some and then get shaken out. Then, we'd see one, sit there and look at it, look at each other, "Is this one real?" It climbs and climbs. "No it's probably fake." It climbs. Climbs more. Still climbing. "I think it's real. F it, I'll jump on." Bang. It goes down again. It was some of the most nauseating nonsense you could imagine. None of the technical tools matter in times like this. That thing will barrel through every support or resistance you can draw on your chart. Oscillators will peg the extremes and stay there for long enough to make you feel like an idiot for using them at all. Being out starts to feel really good.

I heard weird rumors of some guys who had a system based on a heat map of where out of the money option bets had been laid on. They basically thought, "What's the most criminal way for Them to make money?" and devised a system based on it. Who has enough capital to start a move in a stock that can make the out of the money options suddenly very profitable?

I thought it was BS, but on an up market day, I watched a big market maker crank Amazon down $2 in a few minutes. Just Amazon. Someone in the chat room I was in said, "I guess those AMZN puts weren't so far out of the money after all." That was my last cracked lightbulb moment before I gave up on trading. The thing is a total scam, and They like having retailers participating because it provides liquidity for Their antics.