If the Fed cuts rates, but that action isn’t “news” to anyone, is a selloff still a case of “selling the news”? If Fed Funds rates fall in a forest, and there’s no one around to buy equities, do the cuts still make an impact? (Okay, bad pun.) The market sold off today after rallying hard on the completely telegraphed and fully expected Fed 50bps cut. Anything less than 50, given today’s action, would have probably caused a mass panic or something. Even so, futures are down pretty hard after hours, so we might test those recent lows sooner than expected. After all that whipsawing today, the VIX was basically unchanged.

We’re not a daytrading blog - you already know that. But today’s bonus trade was just about as close to a perfect intraday market call as you can get. We hit “Publish” at 3:08, and granted, the indexes had already put in their tops a couple minutes earlier. But if you caught the email and grabbed some puts, futures, short stock - anything - even seven minutes later, you still had a ride of almost 200 Dow points below to enjoy before the closing bell.

Of course, even with a trade this sweet, people complain. Problem #1: not specific enough. Well, when a post is titled “get short” and all of the major market indexes are discussed, the idea is just to short something, anything. Remember, these bonus trades are for fun, so you shouldn’t be playing with any serious money anyway; but really, provided that you weren’t shorting any of those 2X Ultrashort ETFs (which would put you ultra-long), just about any other long puts or short stock or short futures in existence would have paid off this afternoon.

Problem #2: too late. Well, yes, there was some kind of delay in our broadcast messaging server, so the email notifying people of the post didn’t go out until some time later. That stinks, but it’s also just another reason why using an RSS reader will always beat the pants off of any email subscription. The notification of the post showed up in RSS readers immediately. (What is RSS?) There are links to the RSS feed at the end of this (and every) post, so please subscribe to it.

In any case, don’t sweat this stuff, these little trade ideas are totally free, they aren’t officially tracked, and they could just as easily turn your pristine trading account into raw financial sewage. Sometimes people ask us if we publish bonus trades just so we have an excuse to write more silly disclaimers. The answer: yes.