Hi, I was hoping one of you could answer a question that has been bugging me for a while.

Every now and then I compare different stocks to one another, and I often see that unrelated stocks have the same small-scale fluctuations. The noise in the market seems to be highly correlated. For example, compare the Dow to IBM: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1338443739571&chddm=25415&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:IBM&cmptdms=0&q=INDEXDJX:.DJI&ntsp=0

or IBM to Intel (this is an edit): https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1338408000000&chddm=25415&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:IBM;NASDAQ:INTC&cmptdms=0;0&q=INDEXDJX:.DJI&ntsp=0

All of the tiny little spikes in the IBM stock are present in the Dow (or Intel, or a bunch of other stocks), but I don't see how this is possible, or what it means, or why it happens. It seems like the day-to-day market fluctuations are highly correlated and I see this type of thing all the time. Does this represent some sort of market inefficiency?

I'd be interested to understand this phenomenon more deeply if someone could explain it.