renewableenergystocks.com: By Peter Lynch

The stock market has been anything but predictable lately. In fact, we are on track for the most volatile year in stock market history if we keep up this frenzied pace. At the current pace, 2008 would end up having over 50% of its trading days with movements of +/- 1%.

To illustrate, a recent post by Howard Silverblatt on the BusinessWeek Investing Blog included the following statement:

“S&P 500 volatility as measured by daily changes of at least 1% have soared since last summer’s credit issues emerged as a critical issue, and now stands at a 70 year high. Since the bear-market turnaround in 2002, the number of significant daily market moves has gone down from 49.6% to 11.6% in 2006, and was 12.9% for the first half of 2007. Then, with the emergence of the credit uncertainty, market volatility shot up to 38.6% for the second half of 2007 and now stands at 51.9% for 2008 – a level not seen since 1938.” [ read more ]