So, shortly before the end of the quarter, some funds will sell stocks in portfolios that are in disfavor. Mutual funds sell their tech stocks, for example, because they don't want to show their losers on the books. Ciena Corp., for example, traded lower by about 50 percent this week, during a time when 91 percent of the stock's trades were institutional. But these institutions might not all be mutual funds, so it's hard to tell exactly how much of this might be window-dressing. A year ago, you could have said that day trading was moving some of the Nasdaq stocks, but that's no longer true.
Institutional buyers buy more and more often.
Nearly 52 percent of the volume on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000 came from block trades, which are transactions of more than 10,000 shares. But size isn't everything and, at the end of the day, individual investors still have a lot of power. Ultimately, investors' weight on the market comes to bear in where they invest. Right now, it's not in stocks. And that's evident on the market.