GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS AND NIGERIAN STOCK MARKET VOLATILITY

The current global financial crisis is no longer news but a reality. Our policy makers in the country have been proven wrong based on their ' argument that the country was insulated. Some of the sectors that have felt the heat of the crisis are the banking sector and the stock market. In the stock market, investors lost trillions of naira due the downward fall in the prices of stock. Based on this, the study assesses the extent of the stock market volatility in the period preceding the. crisis and the period of the crisis. Using the All Share Index, the returns for various months were computed, descriptive statistics of the returns was calculated and the volatility of the market was estimated using the standard deviation. It was found that the stock market is highly volatile in the period of the financial crisis than the period preceding it. The recommendation is that the depth of instruments in the stock market should be varied in terms-of fixed securities than equity instruments.