How often does 'the Dow Jones" fall 5% or more? In addition, how often does the dow fall 20% or more?

Answer 1

go to say Yahoo finance, look up the Dow, and you can look at the history.

Answer 2

It is very, very rare. In fact, given the Dow's closing yesterday (10,868.38), a 5% drop would be about 543 points which is almost unheard of. When the NYSE reopened on September 17th, 2001 following the attacks on 9/11, the Dow fell 684 points which was then a 7.1% drop - the biggest one day drop in the history of the index. A 20% drop in the Dow is almost impossible. The reason? The Dow is a price-weighted index meaning that higher stock prices have a bigger emphasis on the performance of the index than do lower stock prices. With this in mind, the 30 companies in the Dow are most representative of the giants of American business - Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, GE, McDonald's, etc. and for all of them to suffer similar large declines resulting in a 5-20% drop is almost unheard of. Smaller gyrations in the index are common, but anything bigger than 3% can be considered quite rare (based on Friday's closing level).

Answer 3

See answer #1

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5eDJI&t=1d&c=