I pulled up a GIF of the Dow Jones average since 1980. I wish I had a way to post it here. The average itself is interesting, about 1,000 something in 1980, with a slow, steady rise throughout the 80s except for a dip at the end of 1987. Around 1995 it gets interesting, beginning a steep rise from about 4,000 to above 10,000. It's been fairly steady since, with the slow drop to where we are now.

But that's not the most interesting part. The curve I found, with monthly intervals, shows not just the average, but the range (how far the average has varied) across a given month. Before 1995, the monthly range is so narrow that the curve looks almost like a line. After 1995, the averages become so spasmodic that the curve looks like the San Francisco Earthquake on a seismograph.

Even more informative is the chart on the bottom, which shows trading volume. The values are almost flatline until 1997, then the chart spikes upward almost logarithmically. Trading volume has increased tremendously in the last few years, and the Dow has become highly unstable.

I think a big part of the market's problems may be the massive influx of new traders, mostly amateurs, due to an increase in investment in retirement accounts, and increase access to trading capacity through computers and such. What else would explain the huge volume increases?

It would be interesting to track when companies like Schwab and others first made online trading accessible to "normal" people, and compare this to these trends.

I don't know where this is going, but if I saw an EEG that looked like this, I would call it the onset of fibrillation.