How to Cover Wall Street

Mundane trading days like Monday are now exotic and rare

Today was an incredible day for the markets. At the closing bell, the Dow had fallen a remarkable…five points. That’s about one-sixteenth of a percentage point, in case you were counting. The negligible stock movement may seem yawn-worthy at first blush, but in the new upside-down world, where markets soar and plunge in the thousand-point range, and swings of three, four and five hundred have become the norm, a mildly-swaying, low-volume trading day like today is way out of the ordinary.

In the halcyon days of two months ago (when we were just in a recession, not an apocalypse), a financial reporter would have cursed a day like today, because it would mean they’d have to really scrape and claw to find something to write about. Manufacturing is at its lowest level in a quarter-century, but the market hasn’t reacted. And traders don’t expect to be surprised by the country’s choice for leader of the free world. But parsing the minuscule stock movements of individual companies and industries and trying to extrapolate a unifying economic theory would, in the summer, have been tedious and unmemorable.

But we’re in Bizarro World now, and a market that doesn’t break out of a 140-point range for the whole day (versus the October daily average movement of 594 points), is big news. Calm is the new volatile. Same is the new different. Normal is the new “what the…?”

Bloomberg, AP and the New York Times have issued fairly restrained market wrap-ups. But I’m going to go ahead and declare this day momentous, precisely because of its ordinariness.