Anyone who has been watching the Nikkei over the last month has noticed that the Japanese stock market has routinely been selling off throughout the trading day. Whether or not the index opens higher or lower, more often than not it is closing well below levels that it has touched during the trading day. In fact, over the last twenty trading days (a period going back three days before the index peaked), the Nikkei has closed more than 1% below its intraday high 13 times! We haven't seen that type of intraday selling in the Nikkei since the Financial Crisis, and before that, December 2001. In the 1990s, there were multiple occurrences where the Nikkei saw this kind of intraday selling, but keep in mind that the 1990s weren't exactly a good period for the Japanese stock market.
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