For many mutual fund managers and hedgies, performance for bonus purposes is calculated as of the end of October, so that necessary meetings and calculations can be completed by the year-end. As a result, illegal tape-painting tends to reach a crescendo around the October month-end. Much of the program activity today was probably for that purpose and certainly allowed the indexes to ignore the increasingly dismal economic news. How long they can hold it up? We’ll only know in retrospect. Where is the SEC? Who knows, they occasionally go after egregious corprate offences like the option backdating, but never go after Wall Street. It is well-known that they monitor the last day of the month for tape-painting but not before. So the tape-painting moves a day earlier.