Wake Me In Another Few Hundred Points

After a couple sessions of relative peace and harmony, the equity markets were back in bloodletting mode today, with the major indices each off by more than 1.5% on this morning's moderately underwhelming earnings and outlook from Wal-Mart, along with a mixed inflation report (hot headline, cool core) for July.

Still, even the combined effect of today's pullback and the last few weeks' worth of unusually high and downward-biased volatility haven't yet conspired to deal us a market "correction" strictly speaking.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average still needs to bleed another 500 points before it will have fallen 10% from its all-time high of 14,000 set on July 19th.  The Nasdaq Composite has fallen a bit further from its multi-year high of 2,724 set the same day, but still has a ways to go before it officially earns its stripes.