The Rise in Volatility

It’s hard to convey the dramatic rise in the stock market’s volatility in a graph. I think this one does a good job. It’s the daily changes of the S&P 500 from mid-September until today.

In the first two-thirds of the graph, the stock market rarely went down, and rarely rose by more than 1%. Since then, it’s gotten much more interesting. We’ve already had six 2% down days this year.

In today’s session, the Dow rose as much as 440 points. I was skeptical. I didn’t see the need for a big rise after an ugly day on Friday. At 12:27, I tweeted:

As it turns out, I got close to the top. The markets soon reversed course.

The S&P 500 closed higher by 0.33% today. While that’s not a big change for the day, we saw a lot of intraday movement. This is a very different market than the one we saw late last year.

Posted by on April 9th, 2018 at 7:25 pm


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