Jackson Free Press

Thursday trading saw the Dow careen back up at the close, presumably on bargain hunting and the sense that a Dow of 8,000 (which it reached briefly) is a floor for this bear market. The real story, however, was intraday trading...there were 911 points between the Dow's low and high. It closed up 552 points, it's third greatest point gain in history.

It was the second time the market "retested" those lows, which were first hit around Oct. 10. The major gauges slumped to around those levels at the end of October and now again in mid-November.

The S&P 500 and NASDAQ saw even greater percentage gains, as both came in at over a 6 percent increase.

This week has seen a rash of bad economic news from higher-than-expected unemployment to dramatically higher home foreclosures. In general, the market has been down since the election, where gains were had in the run-up to the voting. Both hedge funds and mutual funds are blamed for some of the volatility in the market, as investors pull dollars from investments that would have previously been thought of as extremely conservative and move them even deeper into low-return options like treasury bills, currency, metals and bonds.