I SPENT part of Friday night trying to determine if the Straits Times Index's 139 point gain that day was the biggest point advance in its 50-year history.

It turned out to be the second biggest incidentally, but the trawl through the Bloomberg machine also threw up some interesting bits of information. 

On August 8 and November 29 last year, and again on September 8, the STI was up by over 100 points. To again find such wild gyrations, one has to go back a decade – November 3, 1997 and January 13, January 19, February 2 and June 3 in 1998 – to be precise.  

You get the drift of what I am conveying.  The scale of the credit crunch crisis now confronting global financial markets is affecting our local bourse in very much the same way which the Asian financial crisis had done so 10 years ago. 

STI's biggest jump in history was 204.27 points. It occurred on February 2, 1998. 

What prompted STI to make such a jump that day could have been a jerk-up response to some emergency package which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was planning to give Indonesia which was among the worst affected countries in the region. 

Now a similar rescue package is being rushed by the US government  over the weekend to stop the global financial system from seizing up, as a result of convulsions on Wall Street. 

While Asian markets had reacted with jubilation when the bailout was announced on Friday morning, the major regional indexes have almost come to a standstill today. STI fell 14.9 points while London, Paris and Frankfurt are stuck in a similar rut.

It seems to be the markets’ way of telling investors: Take a pause. Evaluate what is going on carefully, before jumping headlong back into stocks again.