March 9, 2012 Prices Up for Third Straight Day
The week closed with the DJIA, the NASDAQ, and the S&P500 rising for the third time in as many days. Todays pattern of up-three-for-all-three is quite unusual, even though four other such closes occurred since February 2, 2012. The record shows a total of just 75 such days in the more than 3,000 trading days in this century.But note the even rarer feature of the past six trading days: todays three successive gains follow three losses in a row. While the last repeat of this double chain happened, just as above, on February 2, we repeat the previous caution with an even stronger beware, that only four such days can be found over the past 13 years.In addition to their infrequency, todays diagram reveals these to be recent, with none before the beginning of 2007. As for insights of the near future, whether the current recovery will continue, or hit a ceiling, with another soon to come phase of falling prices, this history is less than optimistic. Whereas prices continued their advance after the most recent, last three repeats, the 2007 peak came just months after that Februarys double three day sequence. DJIA .11 percentNASDAQ .60 percentS&P500 .36 percent 