Volatile Markets!

I went to a National Investor Relations Institute (SF) luncheon yesterday, where the speaker was the head of investment banking for Pacific Growth Equities. He shared a statistic on how volatile the markets are in 2008 that boggled my mind: the market went either up or down by at least 2% in 58% of the trading days so far in 2008 (or maybe it was in Q1). That compares to something like 17% for all trading days in 2007, 6% in 2006, and 4% in 2005. I am recalling this off the top of my head as I didn't have a pen and paper to write it down. But if these aren't the exact numbers he quoted they are pretty close. The point being that we are in incredibly volatile times.