Elephants

In the casino businesses, there are whales. These are the big-time gamblers who fly in from the world's major financial hubs to bet $100,000 a hand on baccarat or pai gow. In basketball, there are unicorns: seven-foot centers who can still shoot from three-point distance.

On Wall Street, they have elephants (they also have bulls and bears, but that's a different story). "Elephants" are large institutional investors: big banks or hedge funds that have enough muscle to push the market around on their own.

Old joke your 6-year-old niece might have told you:

Where does an elephant sit at dinner?

Anywhere they want.

That's the basic principle. If an elephant chooses to stampede the market, there's not much anyone can do about it.