Why the ongoing sell-off in the US stock market isn't a big deal

The worst year since 1937 for the S&P 500 saw the index fall 33 per cent in 115 days as a weakening economy, rising unemployment and spiking inflation pushed investors to head for the exits

The 2018 casualty list in markets is long. Hedge funds, Apple and Amazon’s trillion-dollar price tags, trading results everywhere. Not even Christmas was spared the wrath of cascading stocks. It has felt unprecedented, like Armageddon, or maybe even the robot apocalypse. It wasn’t.

While any 20 per cent sell-off hurts, the one happening now is far from unheard of in terms of depth or velocity. Over the past 100 years, there are almost too many examples to count of stocks tumbling with comparable force.

“It’s an inevitable process,” Marshall Front, founder of Front Barnett Advisers, who began on Wall Street in 1963.