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Quotation

Before the flash crash, 67 percent of U.S. households owned stocks; by the end of 2013, only 52 percent did: The fantastic post-crisis bull market was noteworthy for how many Americans elected not to participate in it. It wasn’t hard to see why their confidence in financial markets had collapsed. As the U.S. stock market had grown less comprehensible, it had also become more sensationally erratic.... The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006, for instance. There were days in 2011 in which volatility was higher than in the most volatile days of the dot-com bubble.