Next week is Commonwealth’s National Conference—an annual event where as many Commonwealth advisors as can make it gather together to learn, to network, and, most important, to have a good time together. This year, we are down in Austin again, a wonderful town. I am very much looking forward to it!

The other day in my post on the likelihood of another market crash, I pointed out that stocks could be viewed as either cheap (based on expected earnings growth and the forward P/E ratio for the past five years or so) or expensive (based on most of history before that). The real question, going forward, is whether the past five years are a better guide for the future or whether prior history is. In other words, are things different this time?

As you might imagine, I have been thinking about the financial markets quite a bit in recent days and trying (as we all have) to figure out what comes next. As I went through this process, though, it occurred to me that this is a great chance to evaluate how we think about the market as well. So for today’s post, let’s do both.

After yesterday’s bounce, we’re seeing another bad day for the market. When I started writing this, the S&P 500 was down another 2 percent. The proximate cause here seems to be slower-than-expected revenue growth in two bellwether tech companies, Google and Amazon. They are down significantly more than the market as a whole, although the damage is widespread.

I still suspect that current market volatility will ultimately prove to be a short-lived pullback. But there is no doubt that the risks are rising. Yesterday’s drop started to show signs of what could be a break in confidence, which could lead to further losses. As such, we need to start thinking about what those losses might mean. Even if this isn’t the next big market crash, we can reasonably expect that to show up in the next couple of years. So, this line of thinking certainly isn’t wasted effort.

We have spent the past couple of days worrying about the market dropping. Indeed, today we have a further decline. This volatility isn’t unexpected, certainly. But the further down we go, the more worried we should be—and the more inevitable further declines look.

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.