Investors face unfamiliar territory: today’s decline, after Friday’s rise, that followed Thursday’s decline has repeated only 64 other times in this century!
Our diagram shows these happenings distributed almost equally over the last five price cycles. Though the 2007-2009 decline has the greatest frequency –some 4.5 percent- the previous 2003-2007 bull market is in second place with 3.2 percent.
While these data do not allow inferences about the current market, they do show that prices increase often on the following day. Indeed, they went up 63 percent of the time even during the 2007-2009 bear market.
A word of caution: remember that today is the 1,055th day of the current bull market. The 1996-2000 expansion ended after 1,059 trading days.
DJIA -.12 percent
NASDAQ -.07 percent
S&P500 -.07 percent
