Off-the-charts stock market volatility is a sign we’re living financial history
The S&P 500’s daily ranges in each of the first three sessions of the week all rank in the top 35, based on data going back to 1982.
As any rabid “White Lotus” fan can tell you, it’s a common superstition that good and bad things tend to come in threes.
That’s what we’ve seen in the US stock market so far this week. It was a trifecta of exceptionally volatile sessions, with one relatively flat day, followed by one big loss, and capped off by the S&P 500’s largest daily gain since 2008 after President Donald Trump diluted most of his reciprocal tariffs for 90 days.
Monday saw a swing from a low of -4.7% to up as much as 3.4%, Tuesday from a high of 4.1% to down 3%, and Wednesday’s 10% daily peak came after a 0.7% intraday decline.
Those sessions all rank in the 35 biggest daily ranges for the S&P 500 based on data from Bloomberg going back to 1982, with Wednesday cracking the top five. To track the range, we measured the distance between the day’s high and low relative to the previous session’s closing price, in percentage points.
For context, the average daily range is about 1.2 percentage points, with the median at 1 percentage point.
If you scan through the dates on this list, you’ll notice that nearly all of them are associated with major economic and financial events, the kind that get memorialized in capital-letter terms for decades to come. Think Black Monday, Global Financial Crisis, Dot-Com Bubble, and so on. It’s a neat way to be able to appreciate the gravity of the present moment: we’re living financial history.
And I suppose that any time our colleague David Crowther reminds us that volatility loves company, we should sit up a little straighter and listen.
