Can a stock market be simultaneously calm and chaotic?
One would be forgiven for thinking things have been a bit bonkers lately. Individual stocks have taken investors on the proverbial rollercoaster ride, with spectacular climbs followed by stomach-churning drops.
For example, shares in chipmaker Intel, which employs about 4,900 people in Ireland, have risen fivefold over the past year. However, it has not been a smooth ride, with Intel plunging more than 40 per cent from its recent peak before rebounding 25 per cent in just five trading sessions.
Shareholders in another chip stock, SanDisk, may consider Intel’s journey almost pedestrian. A year ago, the company was worth $6 billion (€5.2 billion). By late June, it was worth $350 billion, following a surge of almost 5,500 per cent.
READ MORE
Those who wondered whether the market had got a little ahead of itself got their answer when shares fell almost 60 per cent over the next four weeks, before rebounding 26 per cent in a single day.
Other examples abound. IBM, supposedly a boring blue-chip company, suffered a record one-day fall of 25 per cent on July 14th.
The world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, lost more than a trillion dollars in market value during the recent market pullback, before rebounding 17 per cent in a week. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft – even among the world’s largest companies, investors are displaying an unusual willingness to rapidly change their minds, with the market narrative shifting from one day to the next. And yet, casual index investors may not have noticed a thing.
The S&P 500 was flat in July and is up 12 per cent in 2026. Wall Street’s volatility index, the Vix, trades below historical norms. So, is today’s market especially volatile? Yes and no. Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management compares today’s market to a duck: calm above the surface, but paddling furiously underneath. Lamont calls this market duck “Crazy Legs”.
Index investors sitting on top have enjoyed a relatively smooth ride, but those holding individual shares are down in the roiling waters below, where the risks and opportunities are much greater.
“So far”, says Lamont, “Crazy Legs shows no sign of slowing”.
