March 25, 2009
Today was another repeat of the recent up-and-down pattern, that prevent a continuation of an upward move indicating that the recovery of prices is finally at hand. Only 42 sets of such a series exist that show the identical repeats of the past nine days; moreover, only twelve of these are in this century.
As noted several times before, most of these clusters appear in periods of price declines. The diagram below, showing the daily closing prices of the DJIA, has 12 vertical lines identifying those occasions in the period between January 2000 and this week. There may be differences of interpretation, but except for the five events clustered in the 2003 recovery, the other seven occur when the upward momentum is faltering, or, indeed, has already turned negative.
Negative days outnumber the positive ones on the following day. The S&P500 managed only three up closes and had nine declines. These ranged from near zero to -2.6 percent; four were deeper than minus one percent. The NASDAQ and the DJIA have somewhat better showings, yet these managed to go higher on only four and five occasions.
DJIA 1.17 percent
NASDAQ .82 percent
S&P500 .94 percent