Wall Street has seen unprecedented volatility in the past two months.

So if you are looking for a chart that never changes I have one for you: the number of news articles about “guidance.”

For the uninitiated, guidance is what companies do when they update investors on their expectations for future earnings.

That typically happens once a quarter at the same time they are announcing current results. Guidance could be indicating estimates are higher than previously expected, or they could be lower.

What’s weird about this quarter is the number of companies providing guidance of “no-guidance”, ie no specific estimate. From Bloomberg’s Sarah Ponczek:

Of the close to 50 companies that had reported earnings as of Monday morning, only nine of them had provided estimates of what profits would look like this year, according to Credit Suisse. Among those nine, only a third updated their forecasts when they reported, while six firms pulled their previous guidance.