Stats › Volatility and VIX › 1% days
How many 1% days a year
This is the simplest measure of market volatility there is, and I think it's also the most useful one for a normal person. Count the days the index closed more than 1% away from where it closed the day before, up or down, and divide by the number of trading days. That's it. No model, no options maths, no assumptions. Just a tally of what actually happened.
Compare that to the VIX, which is what most people reach for. The VIX is derived from option prices, which makes it forward looking and also makes it a price rather than a measurement. Useful, but it tells you what the options market expects, not what the market did. This page is the other side of that coin, and it turns volatility into something you can count on your fingers: about 26% of sessions, roughly 53 a year, near enough one a week.
What's on here is the long run average, the recent years, and the pair that makes the whole point better than any explanation could. 2017 had 8 such days. 2018 had 64. Consecutive years, same market, same companies, eight times the count. Three sources at the bottom with their dates. Read the note underneath too, because the long run figures come from two different measurement bases and I'd rather you knew that than assumed they were one series.
About 26% of trading days move 1% or more in either direction, roughly 53 sessions a year. The variation between years is enormous: 2017 had 8 such days and 2018 had 64, in consecutive years. 2025 had 56, or 22% of sessions. Through June 2026 the year was running at 24.1%, 27 of 112 sessions. This is the realised counterpart to the VIX, which measures what the options market expects rather than what actually happened.
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