Undressing the Window Dressers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 8:54AM EDT · Published Mar 30, 11:04AM EDT

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From Ticker Sense

Earlier in the week we sent our subscribers a report, which was later picked up by CNBC, on end of the quarter window dressing. The report concluded that the stocks which do best from the start of the quarter up until the start of the last week, will also outperform the market in the final five trading days of the quarter.

So far Q1 2007 is shaping up to be no different, although given themarkets weakness this week, the net result is that investors followingthis strategy will just end up losing less than than the marketoverall. As the table below illustrates, the twenty best performingstocks in the Russell 1000 through 3/23 are down 0.46% throughThursdays close, while the average stock in the Russell 1000 is down1.40%.

In terms of deciles, we end up with a similar scenario. The groupof stocks with the best performance up through 3/23 (decile 1) hasoutperformed every other decile in the final four days of the quarter.

Top_twenty_stocks_q1_07_through_0_2

Deciles_q1_07_through_0323_2

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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.