Volatility in markets

My mind turns today towards the volatility and performance of markets over the past couple of decades.  Volatility is a speculators delight but a business person’s nightmare.    Lack of even short term stability prevents markets from being efficient – let’s face it how can a hundred prices an hour all accurately reflect the future earning potential of that company?  Looking at some charts –you have to love Google – it is clear that volatility is increasing not reducing.  That’s interesting in itself.  We could kid ourselves that the world is becoming increasingly unstable – but it was pretty unstable in the first half of the last century – i mean those were some pretty serious wars!   No I think electronic trading and increasingly opaque instruments have allowed this to happen – oh for the days of real business and the Medici.   Not everyone is convinced that we live in a time of increasing volatility – and it matters how you measure it.  Actual movements are fairly meaningless but percentage movements and measures of SD reflect more accurately changes in the market (100 of a 5,000 sounds dramatic but is less than 25 of 1,000).  And it hits some sectors worse than others.  Somewhat ironically it is financial services themselves that are most volatile .................