For the 216th time in this century, prices moved higher after declining the day before. With nearly 3,300 trading days since January 2000, this comes to some 6.6 percent, once every 15 sessions, or one repeat every three weeks on average.
In addition to this regularity, prices on the following day moved up about as often as they declined. They maintained this next-day up/down consistency in good times and in bad times.
One feature though deserves attention: the irregularity of these repeats over the last four price cycles. Whereas this pattern occurred only 5.2 percent of the time in the current expansion, its repeat rate was 8.6 percent during the 2003/2007 bull market. A similar disparity exists in the two bear markets: 9.3 percent from 2007 to 2009, but 4.6 percent in the 2000/2003 decline.
This pattern, accordingly, fails to provide much, if any, insight of future price developments.
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