Mario Gabelli, chief executive officer of Gamco Investors Inc., said he has been ignoring the recent extreme stock market volatility.

He said his investment horizon is three to five years, not six to 12 weeks.

"It takes that long to learn about a company if it's new or outside your core competency," Gabelli told CNBC.

He described his approach as leveraging "compounded knowledge about selected industries."

Gabelli's investment company has $40 billion in assets under management.

So just how volatile has the market been in recent weeks?

During the recent correction, the S&P 500 saw six trading days in a row where the range of the index was 2 percent or more off its previous close, MarketWatch reported. (On Aug. 24, the S&P 500 saw its largest point swing by percentage, 5 percent, since August 2011.)

The S&P 500 is on track to have an above-average number of trading days where the index closes up or down by at least 1 percent in 2015, according to Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at Convergex Group. So far this year, the S&P 500 has had 43 trading days where the index has closed up or down 1 percent or more.

Gabelli isn't the only prominent financial voice to caution against taking market volatility too seriously.

The recent stock-market volatility “lacks common sense,” but legendary hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, founder of Omega Advisors. sees the bull market charging higher.

"I think the machines seem to be taking over, which I have a very negative view of," the Omega Advisors chairman and CEO told CNBC.

He said the recent extreme market volatility is due to complex, automated quantitative and risk-parity trading, CNBC reported.

"It's scaring the public, and if the public gets scared, they leave the market. It's going to raise the cost of capital to business."

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