Watching the market's moves on individual days can be a bit of a fool's errand. For long-term investors, what matters is the larger pattern, not the day-to-day movement. The last two days have been an illustration of that. Tuesday looked like a disaster, with the S&P 500 losing 1.5 percent of its value. But there wasn't much time to panic: The index made all that ground back and more yesterday, rising by 1.75 percent.
It may feel like the markets whipsaw investors around like that fairly frequently, but according to research from Bespoke Investments, it hasn't happened that much lately. In the bull market that started in 2009, there have been only six other times when the S&P has lost, then gained at least 1.5 percent on consecutive trading days.
This week's gyrations are nothing compared to what we saw in August of 2011. The S&P 500 lost 4.4 percent of its value one day, only to gain back 4.6 percent the next day, in the midst of the European debt crisis and S&P's downgrade of the United States' credit rating. Now that's market turbulence.
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