The U.S. stock market has fell to the lowest level since 2008 due to a mass amount of mutual fund withdrawals and Wall Street job cuts. Roughly 6.69 billion shares were swapped around on the U.S. exchanges in the amount of 50 days which ended on january 18th, the lowest amount ever recorded…excluding OTC venues. On the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), volume has reached a shocking low and hasn’t been this low since 1999, according to Bloomberg data. This slowdown shows that many investors are acting quite bearish and are either taking their losses and withdrawing from the stock market or just withdrawing from the stock market before it’s too late. Many mutual funds are taking losses and things are not looking good on Wall street. Securities firms around the world had to cut more than 200,000 jobs last year. What is really putting a strain on the U.S. stock market is Europe’s debt crisis. Mark Turner, who is head of U.S. sales trading at Instinet Inc. in New York believes that many investors have low confidence in the current market and do not want to set themselves up for disaster. Turner believes as soon as Europe’s debt crisis has figured out some kind of plan to recover, the U.S. market will begin seeing a large spike in volume.

This month, the S&P 500 has seen a 4.6 percent rise, however, has failed to offset the decline in volume. Bloomberg data shows that about 6.85 billion shares worth $209.6 billion have been moved around in the stock market each day this year, down about 16 percent and 12 percent, from the same time period in 2011. Good news is that the S&P 500 rose to an almost six-month high of 1,315,38 last week. The NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) has never seen such bad trading volume since 1999. The 50-day average shows 847.5 million shares last week. As for value traded, we’re looking at an average of $25.1 billion, a level like this hasn’t been seen since 2005. Moving forward, the Nasdaq Stock Market isn’t looking so good either, with the 50-day average being 1.72 billion shares. Daily stock movement has been $45.1 billion, which is the lowest since 2010, according to Bloomberg data.

As I previously mentioned, investors are not willing to take a lot of risk, considering how 2011 went, which all in all was a terrible year for the stock market. Many hedge funds are losing massive amounts of money; in 2011, hedge funds lost 4.9 percent. Many managers have cut leverage, or money borrowed for trading…Not to mention, there has been a major decrease in volume. What you should take away from this post is that the market is not doing good. Lets hope the market turns around soon and gets out of this bearish stage.