August 14, 2008
Advances characterized most of the trading, and the recovery withstood the later downward trend to close on the positive side. The NASDAQ led the indices with its gain of just above a full percent for the day.
Searching the trading data in order to summarize the market situation, we summarize the past three days as a +1/-2 sequence; that is, a positive close after two successive negative days.
There have been 48 of these since January 2000; today is the second time for the chain this year.
The figure below for the DJIA- shows that most of these +1/-2/ strings came when the market was rising. There were 34 occurrences during the 2002 to 2007 expansion; only 14 incidents took place when the price trend was down. The same summary applies to the NASDAQ and the S&P500 indices.
In terms of the following day, in the past, since 2000, both the DJIA and the S&P500, scored gains 30 times and declined on 18 days. The NASDAQ has 29 positive closes and 19 declines.
DJIA .72 percent
NASDAQ 1.03 percent
S&P500 .55 percent