The Spooky October Stock Market

Weird things are happening in the Stock Market.  Normally stocks go down in the summer and up in the winter.  

This last summer, starting about July, stocks started broadly increasing in price despite the fact not many people were trading.  The increase has continued into the fall.

What raises this fact to the level of being weird is that each month for the last few months has seen headlines in the financial press about the billions of dollars being pulled out of stock mutual funds by retail investors.  

So stock prices keep trending up even though huge chunks of retail investors are abandoning the stock market.

What is going on?

Is it that the money being pulled out by retail investors is being replaced by Corporations - flush with cash but afraid to invest - buying back their own shares?  This would have a multiple short term benefit for corporate management, it keeps remaining investors happy that the stock price is up, it qualifies management for bigger bonuses to the extent the bonus is dependant on stock price, and it also boosts up the value of stock management already holds.

But how long can Corporations prop up stock prices when retail investors are bailing?  The retail bail-out is not unexpected, people traditionally move out of stocks as they near retirement for the safety of bonds, and big chunks of the baby boomer generation are at or near retirement.  What happens to the Corporations when they can no longer prop up their stock price and their market value plummets?

Is the bail out of stocks going to be like a dam breaking instead of a trickle over the top of the dam?  Are we about to see an October market freak out like October of 1929, or October of 1987?