Prices continued their decline with the DJIA and the S&P500 losing ground for the fifth day in a row; the NASDAQ posted its fourth successive drop.
Such long strings of negative are rare; they add up to less than one percent of all trading days. Our diagram plots all of these -there are 18- since the start of the 1996 expansion. It reveals only five days on which the negative count deepened to six.
Though three of these further losses happened in the current bull market, prices continued to move higher.
However, as we have noted before, reliable projections based on so few data points are impossible. That statistical limitation, though, is vexing when developments, as in these recent days, demand a peek into the future.
Yet history provides two cautions:
As of today, the S&P500 stands at 250 percent of its 2009 low, whereas the last two bull markets topped after recovering 194 percent and 255 percent of their bottoms.
Further, consider this expansion’s length. At 1,145 trading days since its 2009 low, it exceeds or borders on the age of the last two bull markets; they ended after 1,059 and 1,154 days.
DJIA -.40 percent
NASDAQ -.19 percent
S&P500 -.27 percent
