Credit to Merrill’s David Rosenberg for this little factoid:

The Dow surged 331 points – moves like that typically take place in bear markets.
See the table below – there have been six of these sessions since the bear
market began a year ago; there were absolutely none in the 2002-07 bull market.

The markets just get more volatile in a bear trend, with big swings both ways. The 2000-2002 bear market saw three separate rallies of 20% or more, with each one rolling over into a spectacular waterfall:

Click image for sharper view. Source: Yahoo! Finance

Here is another screen shot for the chart junkies: 1929-1932:

Click image for sharper view. Source: Yahoo! Finance

Don’t be fooled by the smoothness of this multi-year chart. There were six major rallies in there of 15-30% each. They are just dwarfed by a scale that accommodates a 90% peak to trough loss.

And we may as well include the other major bear market from recent history (1966-1982):

Click image for sharper view. Source: Yahoo! Finance

This one was ridiculously volatile. The Dow just bounced around a range for 18 years, but inflation was raging for most of this period (CPI rose from 32 to 96), so the real value of stocks collapsed by about 75% from the ’66 peak to the ’82 trough.