Swing shift: Wall Street's gyrations no cause for surprise
ABC News
Stocks have swerved scarily this year, with big swings and sharp drops
NEW YORK -- What a wild ride. The stock market hasn’t been this crazy since...a couple years ago.
Yes, stocks have swerved scarily this year as Wall Street comes to grips with a Federal Reserve no longer doing everything it can to prop up markets. The average day last month saw a swing twice as wide for the S&P 500, from its low point to its high, as a year earlier. In one dizzying day, it careened from a 4% loss to a small gain.
Perhaps more jarring was that the S&P 500 flirted repeatedly with a 10% drop from its record set on the first trading day of the year. It's a cold slap for the millions of people who got their first taste of investing in recent years. Until the last few weeks, anyone who began dabbling in the market after March 2020 had known a time where stocks pretty much only went up.
The recent shakiness, though, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. This is what stocks do, and it's the price that investors have paid for their historically strong returns over the long term.