"volatility" means "nobody knows what's going on but everyone is jumpy." The biggest problem with stock markets is they trade on perception. Would you consider perception to be unsettled at the moment? Ergo, volatility. Perhaps more importantly, however, nearly all of the market is a derivative of itself at this point so reality has to go through a Laplace transform in order to move the market. You don't know what that transform is and neither does anybody else. Thus, volatility.
- David RosenbergBarely over 3 months into the year and already no fewer than 22 sessions with intra-day moves in the Dow of 400+ points. We had 1 all of last year. The only other time in the past have we seen so many 400 point moves bunched into such a short period -- Oct 2008 to Jan 2009.