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A Lighter Dow
POINT: Big Points Rarely Mean Big Moves
Anymore. Percentages -- Not Points -- 09/02/97 Today's move in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 258 points ranks as the highest single day point rise in history. But, when you get up into the 8000-point range, these 100+ point days don't seem all that significant, do they? In order to put some apples to apples perspective on things, we unleashed our crack statistician, Spanky the "Wonder Pooch," and had him sniff out the most volatile days in the past two decades. The two largest percentage point days since January 1, 1978 occurred in October of 1987 when the Dow fell over 24% on "Black Monday" and then rose 20% several days later. Other than those two big days, there hasn't been a single day in the past two decades that eclipsed the 10% mark. The average percentage move, in absolute terms, has been 0.68%. So, in today's terms, an average move would be 51 points and today's multi-hundred point move only resulted in a 3.38% increase in the index. Nice, but hardly a monster rally. Oddly enough, today's move was enough to put on the trading curbs. Weird, eh? Spanky just yawned.
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