The roller coaster ride of the stock market in 2014 may have investors fearing the worst, but even a 1,000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average would not be a huge decline by historical standards, 24/7 WallSt noted.

As of Monday’s close, a 1,000-point plunge would only amount to a 6.5 percent one-day drop, and the Dow has fallen more than that multiple times before.

Most recently, the Dow benchmark sagged 7.9 percent on Oct. 15, 2008. And it plunged 22.6 percent on Oct. 19, 1987.

Among the reasons cited for the decline so far in 2014 are slowing GDP, emerging market problems, tapering of Federal Reserve stimulus, and lukewarm consumer confidence and housing sales.

“If earnings are at the heart of much of the market’s movement, there has hardly been one huge American public corporation that has outperformed, as measured by fourth-quarter numbers,” 24/7 WallSt noted. “However, there is a large collection of bad ones.”

In a guest column for CBS Moneywatch, Anthony Mirhaydari, founder of Mirhaydari Capital Management, posed the possibility that U.S. stocks face a “major market meltdown.”

Mirhaydari listed three problems that he said could accelerate an equity downturn.
He said there is a risk that the emerging market currency crisis is “spinning out of control,” that stocks are in danger of panic selling because optimism has been at extremes, and that more grueling budget battles loom in Washington amid the nation’s precarious debt crisis.

Rather than focus on the Dow’s fairly narrow lineup of 30 major stocks, USA Today examined the performance of the S&P 500’s larger universe of 500 stocks.

The newspaper noted the S&P 500's drop of 5.8 percent this year is less than the average 8.2 percent decline since the bull market started in March 2009.

Jeff Kleintop, chief market strategist at LPL Financial, predicted the current pullback will end before the market hits a double-digit correction.

"We are buyers on this 5 percent dip in the stock market," he said. "With all areas of the stock market down in our portfolios, we are adding small caps and broad stock market exposure."

But Sung Won Sohn, professor of economics at California State University Channel Islands, foresees a bigger fall this time around.

"A 10 percent correction is likely as the emerging markets rattle (investors)," Sohn told USA Today.

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