A little remembered fact of stock market history is that on the first momentous day of the Crash of ’29, Black Thursday, October 24, the Dow closed down just 2%.

The previous day it had dropped 6.3%, the steepest decline to date after a more orderly swoon of 20% over 7 weeks. In the first hour of trading on Black Thursday it plunged on record volume from 305.85 to an intraday low of 272.32 (down 11%), then swung to a high of 312.76 that afternoon, and closed at 299.47. That was a 13.2% intraday move, with a barely negative close.

Sound familiar? In the 6 weeks before today, we were down 26%. Yesterday the market closed down 7%, and today it plunged 8% at the open on record volume, then swung 11.9%, touching positive territory, and closed down 1.5%.

In the Great Crash, Friday the 25th was the pause that refreshes, with a swing of only 3% and a flat close. But then came Black Monday and Black Tuesday, the 28th and 29th, with losses of 13% and 12%, respectively. The next two days brought a 32% rally (measured intraday from Black Tuesday to Thursday the 31st), which still closed well beneath the intraday low of Black Thursday. That rally of course failed spectacularly, leading to the 1929 bottom of 198 on November 13.

So are we close to the end of the Crash of ’08? Probably, but the worst could lie directly ahead.

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Yahoo! Finance carries this intraday data back to 1928, but their date function seems to currently be stuck on 1969, so you have to find the days yourself.