When I started writing this today, the S&P 500 was down about 2 percent (though it's come back up a bit in the past few hours), giving us another bad day in the market. Overall, we are down approximately 8 percent from the peak. Once again, concerns are rising over whether this is the big one, the repeat of 2008.

Lots of things happened in 1987. Among others, I graduated from college. But, if you are in the financial industry at all, the mention of 1987 calls only one thing to mind: Black Monday (October 19, 1987), the day the stock market crashed. In many ways, this was the biggest nightmare of many stock investors. So, it is no wonder it continues to cast such a long shadow. In light of the recent market volatility, I think it makes sense to reflect on what happened 31 years ago today and what it might mean for investors today.

I am in the process of writing my speech for Commonwealth’s National Conference in November. I have decided to focus on really understanding what is going on with the trade war and what that might mean for investing. That understanding, of course, requires a fairly deep dive into both what is happening and where the war started.

I don’t get a lot of panicked calls and e-mails when the market melts up, like it did yesterday. When the market rises 2 percent, the sense seems to be that it’s just the universe working out the way it should. But when the market drops 2 percent? Something must be out of whack! And yet, both are signaling the same thing: the markets are struggling to put a price on future uncertainty. When markets bounce around that much, it is because there is real disagreement about what the future could hold and what that means for corporate profits and, therefore, for stock prices.

After declines in the markets last week, the question at the start of this week was whether they would continue. The news from yesterday was, frankly, not all that encouraging. Markets did try to rally, only to fall at the end of the day. Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe that the markets are stabilizing and may even be headed higher over the next couple of weeks.

We had another bad day yesterday, with markets pulling back even further. This big decline, for the second day in a row, sent fear levels even higher. Overall, the drop so far has been about 7 percent for the S&P 500. This is a big loss over two days, especially by recent standards.

Yesterday was a bad day in the market. The Dow was down more than 800 points (800 points!), and the S&P was down almost 100 points (100 points!). Surely, this is the beginning of the end.

Now that the third quarter of 2018 is over, we can look back and gain some perspective on what happened. It was a good three months, for the economy and for the markets—at least here in the U.S. Abroad, the news was much more mixed, particularly for emerging markets. Let’s take a look at some of the big ideas that drove the quarter.

The third quarter looks like another good one, at least here in the U.S. Despite ongoing turmoil—both political (with the Kavanaugh confirmation battle) and economic (with the rising trade conflict and tariffs)—markets rose steadily, reaching new highs. Markets abroad were not as positive, with emerging markets down and developed markets generally flat. On the whole, however, investors should be happy. Given the very real risks we faced at the start of the quarter, things could have been much worse. But will we be as lucky in the fourth quarter?

With politics heating up again—and the news from Washington driving scary headlines—I am getting more questions about what that turmoil could mean for the market. Will politics derail it? Will confidence be shaken? Should we be worried?