Will the stock market go level 3 Wednesday?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

25. Good post

Algorithms are prevalent, but they don't drive the market. They do search for imbalances, in particular among options, and then play those. But effectively it adds up to a kind of noise cancelling noise, smoothing out market inefficiencies like noise cancelling headphones.

I have in particular watched the percentages comparing the 3 indices day by day and I do not see that "nearly the same percentage day after day". Not at all. Does your floor trader friend have some charts or data analysis on that specific point that you could share with us?

And re the SPY (ETF) theory:
Here are the SPY closes for 2025, rounded to the nearest dollar (from .50 below to .49 above) by spreadsheet. We should expect the result to have substantially more than 20% fall on 0 or 5. Let's see. I count 16 out of 60 closes, or 26 percent. I'd have delve back into statistics to see how relevant that is, but my intuition is that it is close to chance and we need a larger sample.

Rounded
559 556 567 569 575 574 564 565 567 561 567 563 551 559 556 561
576 573 583 577 584 594 585 595 594 597 600 610 613 611 610 610
603 605 605 601 606 604 602 598 602 605 602 605 599 608 610 606
603 598 592 593 582 581 580 589 589 595 592 585

So I did it on a year, with first rounding, then div modulo 5 and then transforming to 1 and 0 and then summing.

I got 53 ending on a 0 or a 5 and that is out of 250 (Apr1 2024 to Mar 31 2025) for a percentage of 21.2 % or effectively chance.

So I think your friend's idea is bogus.