Found something fascinating at Karl Denninger’s Market Ticker website:

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That’s a clever little search in which I asked for the highest-volume stocks with prices over ten cents (to exclude the little penny pumper stocks on the OTC market.)

Well gee, let’s add this up!

That would be about 2.126 billion shares in total for these four stocks, two of which (Fannie and Freddie) are so far underwater in their equity value (to the government no less!) that there is no chance they’re worth anything, yet they remain listed, and the other two are zombie banks with Citibank existing only because of… [snip]

These four stocks represented thirty seven percent of all shares traded today.

Today 3,162 different stocks traded on the NYSE. These four represent 0.13% of the total, yet they comprised 37% of the volume. That’s an over-representation of nearly 300 times the average.

This follows well with the idea that we’re not getting any real, meaningful information out of the price action in the markets due to the low volume since May.