This week many have been yammering the markets are being manipulated, given a slew of negative news and the market's relentless pursuit towards the upside. We will demonstrate using an unbiased method that this is not the case, if there's meddling, it's insignificant, the market's behavior is probably due to incredible confusion, not uncanny coordination, far from an anomaly, its been occurring for decades in volatile times, when those accused of meddling were still in their braces.

The forums, and social media sites claim the Working Group on Financial Markets are manipulating the markets, otherwise infamously known as the Plunge Protection Team, which was signed into action on March 18, 1988 in response to the financial markets surrounding October 19, 1987 ("Black Monday") for legislative and private sector solutions for "maintaining investor confidence." To investigate cause and effect, we will analyze investor sentiment via price charts before and after the Working Group in relationship to today.

If the current price chart patterns of the Dow are due to the Working Group manipulating the market, significantly similar price dynamics before it's inception in 1988 would be nonexistent. If similar price chart patterns are discovered, it would imply the price drivers, or the sentiment induced are beyond the Working Group. As we begin to analyze price chart patterns, the dreaded problem of interpretation arises, how do we determine if the price chart patterns are similar with biased eyes, and the emotional cheerleading prevalent in fundamental analysis? How can we maintain objectivity?

Image recognition is unemotional, enabling us to compare decades of price chart patterns in seconds, correlating their causation to ascertain significance, and for determining if today's particular price movements (1 month, 2 month, 3 month, and 4 month price chart patterns) is an anomaly by visually comparing them to 30 years of historical charts.

The findings are enlightening, based on 30 years of chart image recognition, for this month's Dow performance, the most similar price chart is from 1978 chart pattern, for the last 2 months of Dow price chart -- 1983 chart pattern, for the last 3 months of Dow price chart -- 2005 chart pattern, and for the last 4 months of Dow price chart -- 1984 chart pattern. As you can see, the majority of price dynamics are very similar to the early 80s, the Dow's current performance is far from an anomaly. The confusion is certainly observable, from historical sampling, the causation from these similar charts are well below the probability of an upward trend within 4 months, below the minimum 60% probability of an upward price movement. It leads me to speculate, the market will correct itself, based on the historical performance above, ironically, we may not hear much about the Plunge Protection Team soon.

The sentiment associated with the Dow chart patterns are extremely disturbing, the percentages are well beyond their typical range(65% - 85%). This type of signal is usually accompanied with significant downward pressure, as seen historically -- click on the links below for a detailed analysis.

Dow component price simulations from mid March to mid April remain weak at 54% with IBM chart patterns casting remarkable negative trends at 28%. Detail price analysis of each component available in links below.

A side note, JP Morgan Pays $2 a Share for Bear Stearns -- JPM's chart patterns are weak, to say the least.

28% ibm
35% mmm
38% jpm
42% dd
42% ge
42% aa
42% xom
46% c
50% axp
50% hon
50% hd
50% mcd
50% pg
53% pfe
53% gm
53% mrk
53% aig
57% msft
57% vz
57% ko
57% wmt
61% ba
64% cat
64% hpq
64% jnj
69% dis
71% t
71% utx
78% intc
78% mo