Another 500-point Swing? So What.

Feeling a bit frazzled by this volatile stock market? You have good reason. The ubiquitous uncertainty in the market is making investors too fearful to even celebrate the rallies like the two-day one that ended Monday.

The volatility lately has been nothing short of extraordinary. A six-percent gain one day is greeted with little more than a shrug; the market will surely erase it in no time. Dow down 500 points? Oh well, tomorrow's another day.

Just how extraordinary is it? Robert Samuelson reports in today's Washington Post that during the 50 days from mid-Sept to November 21, the market moved 4 percent or more during 25 of them. That's as many days with a 4 percent or more movement as the stock market experienced during the past 25 years. " We've gone from one a year to one every other day," he writes.

Here are some other fun factoids on the stock market movements making the rounds these days:

--The two-day, 11.1 percent rally in the Dow on Friday and Monday didn't even crack the top ten two-day rallies of all time, reports Paul Kedrosky. It was lucky number 13. Not surprisingly, the biggest two-day rally occurred in October 1929 (+18.2 percent) and numbers two and three came consecutively in March 1933 (+17.8 percent and +16.7 percent), making what must have been the biggest three-day rally ever.

--Floyd Norris in the New York Times looks at the S&P 500 index during the two days and comes to a different conclusion. Two consecutive days of 6 percent or more gains in the index hasn't happened since 1933, he reports, and they followed the first two consecutive days of 6 percent declines since 1933, too. At the end of the four days, the S&P 500 was still down 0.9 percent.

--Financial stocks drove the two-rally after President-elect Obama announced his new Treasury Secretary and the government bailed out Citigroup. The sector gained a remarkable 18.5 percent during the two days, but Standard & Poor's senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt warns against celebrating just yet. As of the end of the day yesterday, the financial sector was still down a whopping 60 percent year-to-date.

by Megan Barnett

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