How bad can this slide get?

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If you're growing a little worried about the recent downturn in stocks, some perspective might put you at ease. Bill Luby at the VIX and More blog looked at the various pullbacks of the S&P 500 over the past 26 months - a period of time that incorporates the bull market recovery from the financial crisis selloff in 2008 and early 2009.

According to Mr. Luby, there have been 15 significant stock market pullbacks since the recovery began in March 2009. Not counting the current one, the median average decline has been 5.6 per cent, with a mean average of 6.5 per cent.

Now, who knows how far this current slide will go. But if it is an average pullback, then the S&P 500 would fall between 1286 and 1294. As of late-morning trading on Thursday, the index had fallen just 2.1 per cent from its high.

And how bad could things get? The worst slide for the S&P 500 began last spring and persisted into August, when Fed chairman Ben Bernanke floated the possibility of another round of bond-buying, otherwise known as quantitative easing. That setback carved a 17.1 per cent hole in the S&P 500. So, if the current downturn matches that decline, then investors would be looking at the S&P 500 falling to 1136.

"As you think about the current selling and the recent propensity for buy-on-the-dip investors to keep most pullbacks from becoming too severe, this bit of historical benchmarking should be able to serve as a guideline for evaluating how deep and how long the next pullback might extend," Mr. Luby said.

Of course, Canada's commodity-heavy benchmark index is getting hit more right now, as declining commodity prices whack energy and materials stocks. The S&P/TSX composite index has fallen a total of 5.3 per cent since hitting a post-recovery high in early April. The biggest setback for the index was last spring, when it fell 9.7 per cent by August.

If that decline is repeated, then the index would fall to a low of 12,887, down 1,384 points. Uh-oh: We're already down more than 700 points, putting the index more than halfway there.