One of Wall Street's oldest adages is: markets don't hit bottom on a Friday; another is; don't go long over a weekend or public holiday.
After the events of Friday in US markets, both will be tested very quickly in the next day or so.
No one is talking about hearing the mythical bell ringing that marks the end of a boom, but there's certainly some straining of ears.
Consider this: the big investment bank, Bears Stearns, decides to bail out one of two troubled hedge funds to the tune of $US 3.2 billion to stop it collapsing.
Wall Street analysts say the other fund is bigger and in more delicate condition.
Investors refuse to put money into high risk bonds due to be issued as part of a fund raising for two leveraged buyout deals, or demand higher interest rates.
US Government bonds yield fall sharply in late trading to around 5.13 per cent, down 0.06 points on the 5.19 per cent late Thursday.
And stocks plunge, the Dow down 185 points and the major share markets end the worst week in three months.
The S&P 500 fell 2 per cent to 1502.56, the largest weekly drop since the week ended March 2. The Dow fell 2.1 per cent to 13,360.26 and NASDAQ lost 1.4 per cent to 2588.96.
The Australian market rose, the All Ords up 1.46 per cent to 6409.3. That will be tested today.
And amid all of this, the Blackstone hedge fund lists with one of the biggest IPOs in recent memory. The shares surge as investors chase the tightly-held stock in the after market, providing the lucky initial investors with nice profits.
Was this an aberration or the real story of the health of financial markets?
The conjunction of events on Friday afternoon has lifted the stakes in testing the easy liquidity, easy money market sentiment that has dominated for the past three years and allowed the likes of the Blackstone IPO to happen.
Everyone was saying that the mid-month sell-off in the wake of the sharp rise in US bond yield, to a high of 5.32% for the 10 year security, was over and conditions were returning to normal.
Not after Friday afternoon and not in the coming week with a slew of important statistics on the health of the housing industry and the wider economy, and the two day mid-summer meeting of the US Fed.
The flight to quality into US Government securities and the nasty late sell-off on Wall Street are the worrying portents to emerge from Friday.
Analysts called it 'risk aversion trading'.
The subprime mortgage worries, the concerns about risky highly leveraged deals and concerns about the level of share prices, do not make for a confident background for the Fed meeting.
That means the Fed won't do anything. A rate rise would be the end, sending markets lower and bonds surging. It would trigger a bloodbath.
The Bear Stearns bailout pushed investors to sell shares of investment and commercial banks and buy US Treasuries.
They sought safety and became risk averse.
