This coming week marks the 30th anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. On 'Black Monday', the world's equity markets were in chaos.
Following this, circuit breakers were introduced in an attempt to prevent such dramatic one-day moves. These were further strengthened following the May 2010 'Flash Crash'.
Last week will have been an educational experience for many people, particularly those who have started trading since 2008.
Since the major market averages bottomed out in early 2009, they have generally been in a steady uptrend. There have been one or two short periods where there has been some downside volatility (August 2011 and early October 2014 spring to mind) but they were small beer to what happened over the last few sessions.
Then again, we still need to put this into perspective, particularly with people calling the beginning of the week a crash or even 'Black Monday'. Last Monday, the FTSE and DAX fell more than 5%, and the Dow fell just over 3.5%, although intra-day it fell a lot more. Back in 2008, the Dow fell more than 7% on more than one occasion. And further back in 1987, the Dow fell more than 22% in on the real 'Black Monday' - now that's a crash!
