By Greg Peel

The Dow rose 423 points or 4.0% while the S&P gained 4.6% to 1172 and the Nasdaq jumped 4.7%.

History was made on Wall Street last night as the Dow closed up 400 points because never before have four consecutive sessions seen moves in excess of 400 points, let alone consecutively down and up. Even in 2008 the market found time enough to take the occasional breather. I've no idea what history tells us in percentage terms but I do know that in the dark days of 1929 the ticker machines were running several hours behind due to overwhelming volume, meaning no one much knew what had happened until it had.

Today we not only have instantaneous market updates readily available to all but we also have computers placing and withdrawing orders in microseconds and programmed algorithms that make the decisions, along with big players hiding transactions in so-called "dark pools" and mum&dad investors no longer spitting because they can't get their broker on the phone given they can trade on-line.

Volatility is most often prevalent in "thin" markets but despite some brief black holes both Wall Street and Bridge Street have fallen down into, and up into, this past week in intraday moves, volumes have been the heftiest all year and generally the heftiest since Lehman. So "thinness" is not the cause of the extraordinary volatility we are experiencing.

I would like to eventually see the numbers which determine how much of this week's activity can be put down to "high frequency trading" but the reality is HFT is not about size but about speed. The way I see it we have a large pool of cash which has been sitting waiting for a couple of years for "value" to emerge and a large pool of investments that have been bitten for a second time and just want to get out into cash. Views are polarised between those recognising that there is a lot less vulnerable leverage in the market this time around and those terrified of collapse in Europe and/or fearful of a recession in the US. This is what we call "a market".

Normally in sharp up-days like last night there would be dismissive talk of mere short-covering, but last night a pick-up was noted in both "insider buying" (nothing illegal, just disclosed buying by executives of their own company's stock) and corporate buybacks, both of which suggest "value" views. Yet at the end of the day I just think there is a very large group who simply don't want to be either caught long, caught short, or miss out. The only certainty is uncertainty.

So why did the coin come up heads last night?

Rumours were unsurprisingly in the frame again last night. First of all the media outlet which first posted the "French downgrade imminent" rumour on Wednesday, with no source other than "a trader who wished not to be named", apologised last night for their reckless journalism and withdrew the claim. And then another supposedly more substantive rumour surfaced last night suggesting European officials were considering placing a temporary ban on short-selling ? as occurred in 2008 ? in order to stem the sharemarket "run" on the European banks.

In a dose of reality, it was announced that German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicholas Sarkozy will meet in Paris on Tuesday having each prepared plans for how ever the current crisis within the wider crisis can be addressed. Up until this week Merkel has been under constant fire from her opposition, the electorate, and even those within her own party over thought of providing further hand-outs to all those good for nothing Mediterranean types, but suddenly the complaint is now "why aren't you doing something?!"