The S&P 500 spent the day in a relatively ho-hum 0.64% trading range from its -0.36% low to its modest 0.28% closing gain, but the morning was quite volatile. Why? President-elect Donald Trump held his first press conference since the election, and it was a doozy. His claim that the drug industry is "getting away with murder" sent the index to its intraday low. He also made the astonishing claim that there are 96 million people wanting a job who can't get one, a claim that was debunked by Steve Liesman at CNBC. But the 500 began an early afternoon rally that took it to its closing gain of 0.28%, which was also the intraday high and just 0.07% below its record close on Friday.
Here is a snapshot of the past five sessions (note: our Stockcharts.com source offered no response to our query about the missing intraday volume on Monday).
The yield on the 10-year note closed at 2.38%, unchanged from the two previous closes.
Here is a daily chart of the SPY (NYSE:SPY) ETF, which gives us a better sense of investor participation than the underlying index. From the week before Christmas, only one session, the last market day of 2016, had trading volume above the 50-day moving average.
A Perspective on Drawdowns
Here's a snapshot of record highs and selloffs since the 2009 trough.
Here is a more conventional log-scale chart with drawdowns highlighted.
Here is a linear scale version of the same chart with the 50- and 200-day moving averages.
A Perspective on Volatility
For a sense of the correlation between the closing price and intraday volatility, the chart below overlays the S&P 500 since 2007 with the intraday price range. We've also included a 20-day moving average to help identify trends in volatility.
