Not to be too contrarian about this, but there are always those who bet against the market when the need is there. For example, this past few weeks, when the market was down, oil and gold were up - one could have done quite well timing DIG & DUG. Now I'm not suggesting that there is anything moral about this as people are loosing jobs and houses all over, but my point is that no matter how bad things get, there is always someone somewhere making a buck off of it. This downturn is nothing different: money is changing hands and that by itself is already something for all those people making money off of people trading (there's a whole industry that does this).

I bet if you would had bought, oh I dunno, $10K of Visa towards the end of the day today, you probably could have sold it tomorrow at a profit. If Visa bumps up by a couple of points tomorrow morning, those 150 shares would net you $300 overnight. Now imagine if you had the cash to buy 1500 or 15000 shares, that's a sizable profit for 24 hours' worth of "work". And the people we're talking about have that kind of coin. Yes, there is risk, but with Visa, the worst that could happen is that you might have to hold onto it for a little longer. The estimates are still at about $80 a share by January, so with 15000 shares, you'd be looking at a $225K x-mas bonus. Now that would by a handsome set of speakers, no?

Anyhow, when it comes to greed, nothing surprises me.