There’s a difference between reporting the news and becoming the news. CNBC and Charlie Gasparino are great at reporting rumors - good for them. Now it looks like they are proud of becoming the news - not so good for them. The timing and wording of the “breaking news” story on an Ambac bailout was perfect monoline manipulation. It doesn’t take much to move markets dramatically on a light volume Friday by scaring the shorts in the last hour of trading. It makes me wonder how long Gasparino sat on that story waiting for the best time to manipulate to the greatest effect and how less newsworthy it would have been if it came out after the market close.

Silly me, but I will wait for the news to actually be factual. And if it actually happens, I am confident it will have a short term positive effect. But as for a bailout of Ambac solving all the problems facing our markets and the economy - that’s ridiculous.

As it was, the short covering and whatever other kind of panic caused by the Gasparino “news” created some significant challenges for technical analysis. Closing prices have a large effect on the charts and in this case, the monoline manipulation has greatly distorted the way many stocks look. If I had the resources, I’d redraw every chart by assuming the market closed using 3:00 pm prices and cumulative volume. Instead, I am doing a few other things to desensitize the effects of the end of day action. I recommend you take a look at each stock in your portfolio and carefully evaluate whether you can trust what happened.