The Monthly is showing a much more obvious picture, we have gone up 410 points from last months low, no overlap, just big range bars, at the very least a 38% pullback from last months low brings us to 3557, even with this type of small % pullback the Bull will still be intact.
Well, I certainly don't have your 30 years of experience. It's about 10 years now on/off. Since I know how hazy my memory can be, I can't say for sure, but I also seem to remember the markets being different when I first started out. Exactly how you describe it with more follow through on the downside. These days, there always seems to be a bid in the market and you'll get what you accurately call monster retracements/reversals. I think there's also more false breakouts to the down side. But I can't prove it. Maybe it's because so much of trading volume is algorithmic now and algorithms don't feel the fear in a falling market like a human trader would. Or maybe traders as a whole simply got conditioned to BTFD in this FED supported market. Thanks. I started to put together something, but then my computer crashed. Just as I started digging into it - I realized the difficulties in such a study as there's so many variables to consider. Initial impression from what I did scratch together before my computer crashed is that the down moves are on average slightly faster and larger, but that it's not a great difference. If you compare the largest days down/up it looks much the same. 2020 seems to be the year which contained virtually all market conditions at once. I'll see if I can do something more on that tomorrow or some other day. PS: Let's not forget the monster rally following the vaccine news report shortly after the US election. Regards.
"Maybe it's because so much of trading volume is algorithmic now". This seems to be the real difference between back then and now, besides the FED also taking more of a role in the markets.