haha... Now its a head, shoulder and a tail. We are in a 5 point range. This has got to be the smallest range I've ever seen.
I was looking at a weekly Dow Jones Industrials Index chart. Their are periods were it gets stuck in 1-3% ranges for years. IMO with our national and consumer debt we may be entering into such a period. Their is just no money coming in to drive it, of coarse with terror on the rise that might present more opportunities.
I downloaded all the DJIA data from Yahoo going back to 1928. Then I looked for the smallest 12 month range. The smallest 12 month range was August 51 to July 52 where the low was 254.7 and the high was 280.25 for a 10% range. Again, where do you see "periods were it gets stuck in 1-3% ranges for years?"
U.S. equities were in a pretty tight band from 1976 to 1979. There were also a few instances in the 1950's and 1960's when the market moved very little over several months as it stair-stepped higher. As I recall, periods of little movement (10% or less based on monthly prices) in U.S. equities prevailed about 10% of the time since 1930.
http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/djia1900.html http://stockcharts.com/charts/historical/djia1960.html