This may be the culprit behind last night's massive bearish candlestick on the Nasdaq, without a single lower shadow. Morgan Stanley's derivatives team estimated at noon Eastern Time on the 5th (coincidentally during last night's US stock market trading session): assuming prices remained at the 1 PM level, the forced selling of leveraged ETFs before the close would amount to approximately $52 billion. Of this, the semiconductor sector alone would have absorbed $21 billion, and the Nasdaq 100 would have absorbed another $15 billion. The core issue involves two types of products: 1) Leveraged ETFs, such as "2x Long Nasdaq." These ETFs must do one thing every day before the close: rebalance their daily profits and losses back to the target leverage ratio. When the market crashes, this means they must sell a large number of stocks before the close—the more severe the drop, the more they sell; this is passive, mechanical, and unavoidable. 2) There is also a type called volatility control funds. When market volatility spikes, they systematically reduce their equity positions—again, mechanically, and usually with a one- to two-day lag. Therefore, these two forces combined last night in the US stock market, resulting in a significant scale. When the report came out, Wall Street was in an uproar. This $52 billion "death countdown" became an open secret. Knowing about this mechanical sell order, what was the traders' reaction? Naturally, it was to "rush to sell." The logic is simple: since there will be a large-scale passive sell-off before the close, I'll sell now, and buy back at a lower price after the sell-off ends. So we saw the Nasdaq close with a huge bearish candlestick last night, with massive volume at the close.