The DJIA ended at 416 points down on the day at 12,216, a good 130 points above where it was when I started writing my post on how this just wasn't such a big deal. The drop I remembered most keenly was April 14, 2000, when the Dow dropped 617.78 points, a fall of 5.66%. At the time, that was the largest single-point drop in one day; since then, on September 17, 2001, the Dow dropped even farther; 684.81 points, or 7.13%. That remains the biggest single-point drop to this day.

But, given that the DJIA is in record territory, today's loss of 3.29% is almost nothing when you look at the biggest single-day drops over the past 20 years. As David Gaffen points out in his MarketBeat blog, while today is #7 in points lost, it's not even on the top 10 list in percentage falls. Number one is, of course, October 19, 1987, when the DJIA fell 22.61%, or 508 points, to close at 1,738.74. Number two was, eerily, almost exactly 10 years later, on October 27, 1997, when the Dow fell 7.19%, or 554 points, to close at 7161.

The DJIA has just gotten big, and it seems that with record highs come record single-day volatility. Let's check the next few off the list:

• No. 3: September 17, 2001. 7.13%, or 684 points, to 8921
• No. 4: August 31, 1998. 6.37%, or 513 points, to 7539
• No. 5: April 14, 2000. 5.66%, or 618 points, to 10305.77

Since 2000, we've had six record single-day point drops, but only two show up on the top five biggest percentage drops. Today is, well, a very un-record day. What, you want superlatives? OK, let's try this:

• Every component on all three major Dow indices, industrials, utilities and transports, was down
• The NASDAQ Composite and S&P 500 indices both had the biggest single-point gain since September 17, 2001 (the day trading resumed following the terrorist attacks of 9/11)
• NYSE Composite volume was 4.31 billion shares and NASDAQ composite volume was 3.13 billion shares, obliterating the earlier biggest-volume days (3.58 billion and 3.09 billion, respectively)

OK, so it was a big day. I still maintain it's not a big deal (and, as Peter Cohan says, don't panic! Really).

I remember April 14, 2000. I was in my second year of business school, and it was only weeks before graduation; we were coasting to the end. I came out of my negotiations class and there was an almost visible buzz. Everyone was clustered around a TV monitor turned to CNBC. The NASDAQ was crashing, and the DJIA was dropping, 400 points, 500 points. It ended down 617 points, a record at the time, and with the terrific sell-off in tech stocks many of my classmates' day trading careers were coming to a terrible close. The mood was somber, indeed, and we all went home and clutched our already-confirmed job offers close to our hearts.

While the bear market continued for several years and many of my friends' dotcoms went under before they'd even found the best place to order pizza, somehow the ensuing months of depressed indices and falling averages felt more like the natural cycle of life; as if spring 2000 had been a huge earthquake and the next few years were aftershocks, mudslides, traffic jams. Difficult but not catastrophic. In the meantime, my portfolio stuffed with value picks was fine (but my dotcom, too, went bankrupt -- fortunately, several months after I quit, rendering my never-exercised options worthless).

Today, the market is down again. In lulls in meetings my colleagues check their Treos and report. Down 300. Down 400. As I finish a one-on-one confab, I hear: Down over 500 points. And I say, "it's not that big a deal." The DJIA was in record territory. A few months ago we whispered about record gains between meetings, we IM-ed each other with updates. Could it hit 12,000? It did, and kept on zooming up, up, record after record.

A 500-point drop today is nothing, not an earthquake from which to rebuild but more like a loud, spectacular thunderstorm that causes little damage. Full of sound and fury. Signifying: not much.