Today was no doubt a risk off day for the markets. There was persistent selling pressure in stocks worldwide with the S&P 500 down 2.09%, but international indexes down quite a bit more. Given that today was the first 2% down day since October 9th, 2014 and July 31st, 2014 before that, we thought we’d highlight the utter lack of volatility in these markets since the end of 2011. In the chart below we show the rolling 6-month sum of the number of 2% down moves for the S&P 500 going back all the way to 2000. The blue line is our indicator and is plotted on the right axis and red line is the price level of the S&P 500. What we see is that the number of 2% down days over any 6-month period hasn’t been greater than 3 since the beginning of 2012. For three and a half years the volatility has been sapped from the US stock market the same way it was from 2004-2006.
