Incredible Stock Market Volatility
We’re having more incredible stock market volatility and I’ve spoken about the pickup in volatility as another sign that things are different; that we’ve had a change. Increased volatility usually happens at inflection points, especially when we had a record period of minimum volatility. A of a sudden, we’re having incredible swings in the stock market. Case in point: Monday and Tuesday.
Up Day on Friday
When I did my podcast on Friday, I thought maybe we could have a Black Monday. We had a big down day on Friday, we had a big down day on Thursday. The market was down around 1100 points in 2 days. Could we have another big down day? Of course we actually ended up having a massive up day, in fact, I think the Dow was up better than 700 points on Friday. It closed 600 and change; not quite 700. The NASDAQ was up about 220 points, so even a bigger percentage move.
How to Boil a Frog
So we had this huge gain, and what a lot of people don’t realize is that the stock market has some of its biggest daily gains in a bear market, not in bull markets. You have some spectacular rallies in bear markets. That is how bear markets operate. They are trying to follow the slope of hope. It’s like trying to boil a frog. You turn up the heat slowly so the frog doesn’t notice the temperature change and jump out. The idea is when you have these big spikes in the market, that creates some hope and optimism to hold on to stocks, thinking the decline is over. People are afraid to miss out on the next big up day, so it keeps people in the market, like keeping the frog in the water.
The Rally that Wasn’t
So yesterday we had this huge rally and today we started off with another rally; the Dow was up over 200 points early on, NASDAQ was up 40 or 50 points and then by mid day the market rolled over. At one point the Dow was down better than 400 points. The NASDAQ at its lows was actually down more than the gain yesterday. Now there was a small rally on the close, the NASDAQ was only down 211 so about 10 points less than yesterday.
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