Dow travels 20,000 points in one of the wildest weeks since the financial crisis

Finance news

With another volatile plunge on Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average has traveled about 20,000 points this week.

The stock index is also tracking for a weekly loss of about 6 percent, its worst since October 2008, during the financial crisis.

CNBC tracked the volatile moves of the Dow this week to calculate the number of points the index has moved. In the past five trading days, including Friday, the Dow has traded about 20,000 points back and forth in a roughly 2,000-point trading range.

Dow Jones industrial average 5-day performance

Source: FactSet

Stocks have plunged in the last week as traders worried about rising interest rates and inflation, bringing an end to more than a year of historically low volatility. On Monday, the S&P 500 broke its longest ever streak without a 5 percent drop from a recent high, according to Ryan Detrick, senior market strategist at LPL Financial.

The Dow suffered its worst daily point-drop on record Monday, and briefly fell nearly 1,600 points intraday. The index recovered about half of Monday’s losses in a volatile Tuesday session, but has closed lower in each of the two days since.

On Friday, the Dow jumped 349 points in morning trading, fell 500 points later in the session, before attempting gains.

The CBOE Volatility Index (.VIX) jumped Tuesday above 50 for the first time since the market turmoil of August 2015. It traded near 40 Friday afternoon.

Link to the source of information: www.cnbc.com