From YahooFinance
What's making the stock market act so crazy?
By Jeff Macke | Yahoo Finance
It’s not your imagination: the stock market has gone a little bonkers lately. This week alone the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) plummeted 272 points on Tuesday, rocketed back 274 points Wednesday and sank more than 330 points today. October has already recorded five days where stocks moved more than 1%. That’s as many 1% moves as we saw in the prior five months combined.
So why are stocks so crazy? There’s no set answer but here are three of the most obvious explanations making the rounds on Wall Street.
It’s October
I know it sounds crazy but October is almost by tradition the most volatile month of the year. Whether it’s because of the upcoming holidays, the end of the fiscal year for mutual funds or because we hold elections every other November, October sees far and away the most 1% moves of any month. Remarkably since 1970 nearly one third of every trading day in October has seen the price of stocks change by 1% or more. It's also worth noting that historically bad days like the 1929 crash and 1987's Black Monday crash both took place in October.
Global concerns
The world is always crazy but right now things seem to be rockier than normal. Government officials in Europe are arguing over the best way to ward off an impending recession, growth is slowing to a relative crawl in China and Japan is tipping into a recession. That’s never good for companies driven by exports like General Motors (GM) or McDonalds (MCD).
For their part the Federal Reserve acknowledged these global concerns yesterday and suggested they would be very cautious about raising interest rates because of such worries. That sentiment sent stocks surging, just the latest bit of evidence that investors pay very close attention to every word uttered by the Federal Reserve.
Read more from YahooFinance >>
What's making the stock market act so crazy?
By Jeff Macke | Yahoo Finance
It’s not your imagination: the stock market has gone a little bonkers lately. This week alone the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) plummeted 272 points on Tuesday, rocketed back 274 points Wednesday and sank more than 330 points today. October has already recorded five days where stocks moved more than 1%. That’s as many 1% moves as we saw in the prior five months combined.
So why are stocks so crazy? There’s no set answer but here are three of the most obvious explanations making the rounds on Wall Street.
It’s October
I know it sounds crazy but October is almost by tradition the most volatile month of the year. Whether it’s because of the upcoming holidays, the end of the fiscal year for mutual funds or because we hold elections every other November, October sees far and away the most 1% moves of any month. Remarkably since 1970 nearly one third of every trading day in October has seen the price of stocks change by 1% or more. It's also worth noting that historically bad days like the 1929 crash and 1987's Black Monday crash both took place in October.
Global concerns
The world is always crazy but right now things seem to be rockier than normal. Government officials in Europe are arguing over the best way to ward off an impending recession, growth is slowing to a relative crawl in China and Japan is tipping into a recession. That’s never good for companies driven by exports like General Motors (GM) or McDonalds (MCD).
For their part the Federal Reserve acknowledged these global concerns yesterday and suggested they would be very cautious about raising interest rates because of such worries. That sentiment sent stocks surging, just the latest bit of evidence that investors pay very close attention to every word uttered by the Federal Reserve.
Read more from YahooFinance >>
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