Golden Minerals Company

Considering the heavy volume of money printing operations and the supposed fact that an economic recovery is officially underway, one would tend to think that equity market volumes would be rising instead of sharply falling?

Not a healthy sign - VHF

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September Slow-Down

B.I.G.

September 23, 2010

At the end of last month, we noted that the average daily volume of the S&P 500 in August was the lowest for an August since 1999. While we showed that slow Augusts don't necessarily mean the rest of the year will be slow, the trend has definitely continued into September. Below we highlight the average daily volume for the S&P 500 through the first 15 trading days of September since 1993. This September, just like August, is the slowest since 1999. So far this month, the S&P 500 has averaged 846.4 million shares a day. The index averaged over a billion shares a day in Septembers from 2000 to 2009, so we're not just looking at a small slowdown here.

As we're all aware, the market is up significantly this month, and bears like to use low volume during a rising market as a negative indicator. Volume is definitely light this month as the market has rallied, but it was light last month as well when the market declined nearly 5%. Using volume to measure the strength or weakness of the market right now is futile since it has been weak as the market has both declined and rallied. All it's really telling us is the obvious -- that market activity is way down.