USMarketView

April 18, 2008

Increasing by 4.92 percent, NASDAQ scored the largest weekly gain of the year as the other two indices also closed the week with substantial gains. The S&P 500 increased 4.31 percent while the DJIA moved up 4.25 percent. This was their second highest weekly gain of the year, surpassed only by the week ending February 1, 2008.

In the 16 weeks so far of 2008, the DJIA has the best performance, moving up in eight weeks, while the S&P500 finished higher in seven of the 16 weeks. The NASDAQ shows the weakest results, with only six positive weeks.

Considering the high power performance of the NASDAQ, gaining 2.61 percent today, after Wednesday’s increase of 2.81 percent, in light of the past, when on 27 occasions this index had the same pattern of two or more percent increase on one day, an intervening day, then a two or more percent increase on the third day.

But 19 of those three day episodes took place between February 2000 and October 2003 – that’s the period in which the NASDAQ dropped from 4220 to 1272. The other eight occurred as the index recovered to 1880 on October 2003.

Accordingly, we wonder again, as on Wednesday, in evaluating this pattern, does this performance portend better or worse times ahead?

DJIA 1.81 percent

NASDAQ 2.61 percent

S&P500 1.81 percent

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 12 042008000000Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:27:51 +0000 and is filed under Market Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.