Streaky Market

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 5:35AM EDT · Published Jan 25, 4:21AM EST

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From Ticker Sense

A well-known Wall Street strategist recently put out a report on monthly winning streaks for the S&P 500 where he says that the S&P 500 is on pace for its eighth straight monthly gain in a row. The strategist goes on to say that there has not been a streak of nine straight months in the last twenty years.

We looked into this and found that while the S&P 500 has not had a string of nine straight monthly gains in the last twenty years, it has happened before. Since 1930, there have actually been nine periods of at least eight straight monthly gains, and in five of those periods the S&P 500 rose for a ninth month. The longest streak occurred from 1935 to 1936, when the S&P posted gains for 12 months in a row, while the most recent streak ended in June 1996.

The table below lists each period of at least eight months along with the market’s return during the ninth month. As the table details, even though 8 straight months may mean the market is "due" for a decline in the ninth month, most of the time the S&P 500 rises, with an average gain of 0.8%.

Sp_500_monthly_streaks_1

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.