Remember volatility? Well, it's back. Take a look, for instance, at the last three months of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Between Aug. 17 and Oct. 9, the average daily range — the difference between the intraday high and the intraday low — was 177 points. Between Oct. 10 and Nov. 16, the average daily range was 455 points, 2.5 times greater.
Why you’ll hear about this again: 400- or 500-point days on the Dow are normal, these days, and they almost always happen for no particular reason.
Other asset classes are seeing a similar failure, on the part of markets, to come to a stable consensus on what they're worth. We've already talked about oil, so let's take a look instead at cryptocurrencies.
Volatility tends to mean big drops more than it does big rallies. Chipmaker Nvidia has lost almost half its value since the beginning of October, Apple has lost almost $200 billion in capitalization over the same time, J.C. Penney looks like it might drop below a dollar per share, and California wildfires have poleaxed the stock of PG&E.
Be smart: Insofar as you can, it's worth tuning out this noise. The markets have been weirdly, puzzlingly quiet for a couple of years now. In a world where unknowns abound, it makes sense that valuations would be very hard to pin down.
