HOW OFTEN MARKETS MOVE 1%, 2% AND 3% IN A DAY — RESEARCH PACKAGE (2026-10-26, CURRENT)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
For every index, commodity and currency series the site stores: the share of sessions with a move at or beyond 1%, 2% and 3% in each direction, how many a year that is, the sessions since the last one and the longest gap on record.

KEY FINDINGS
- The S&P 500 has fallen 2% or more in a day on 4.0% of sessions since 1993 — about 10 a year — and the longest run without one was 896 sessions.
- Falls of 3% or more: 103 sessions of 8,492 (1.21%); the last was 2025-04-10.

CHART
The share cards on /market-memory/ and /market-memory/this-day/ render the same figures at 1200×630 and 1080×1080; each page has a download button.

SOURCE AND METHOD
Daily closes from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), Twelve Data; series and identifiers in the source manifest at /market-memory/source-manifest.json
A move is the percentage change between consecutive published closes. Sessions since the last are counted in the series' own trading days. Per year divides the count by the years in the record. No index level is included.
Full method: https://www.wealthsignalnyc.com/market-memory/methodology/
Data: https://www.wealthsignalnyc.com/research/daily-move-frequency/daily-move-frequency.csv (derived statistics; no index levels)

ATTRIBUTION
Source: Wealth Signal Market Memory (https://www.wealthsignalnyc.com/research/daily-move-frequency/), computed from Daily closes from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), Twelve Data, as of 2026-10-26.

SHORT POST
The S&P 500 has fallen 2% or more in a day on 4.0% of sessions since 1993 — about 10 a year — and the longest run without one was 896 sessions.
Historical context, not a forecast. https://www.wealthsignalnyc.com/research/daily-move-frequency/

JOURNALIST PITCH (draft — read it before you send it)
Subject: A dataset, not a take: how often markets move 1%, 2% and 3% in a day
I run Wealth Signal, a small site that recomputes market-history statistics from FRED and other primary series at every build. One table you may find useful: The S&P 500 has fallen 2% or more in a day on 4.0% of sessions since 1993 — about 10 a year — and the longest run without one was 896 sessions. The CSV is free to use with attribution, every number is recomputed from the source series and the method is public. No opinion attached.

NEWSLETTER LINE
The S&P 500 has fallen 2% or more in a day on 4.0% of sessions since 1993 — about 10 a year — and the longest run without one was 896 sessions.