Aug

25

I don't have big data bases like I assume most of you quants do — maybe someone can check this. Have there ever been some big UP Septembers?

Reason being — channel surfing yesterday and I watched 30 seconds of CNBC (all I can stomach anymore at one time) — the finance girl said that everyone was scared of September.

Which gets me to a contrary indicator that I use — when the old market saws are being trumpeted expect neutral or opposite action.

In May we heard the din of "suckers rally", "rally old in the tooth", "rally too far too fast", "rally like 1932". The fear was there and what happened — we still are going up here in late August. If we had been hearing about a Summer rally in May it would have been all she wrote.

So now everyone is terrified of September — hmmm.

Phil Mcdonnell says:

Many people are unnecessarily afflicted with big data base envy. Since roughly the development of V!agra even the little guy can now have a big data base for free. So there is no longer a need to envy the big Wall Street firms, at least on that score.

For example complete Dow Industrial data may be downloaded from Yahoo from 1926 to the present. It is available on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and can be directly downloaded into a spreadsheet. This query will download DJIA daily 1928 to present.

Historical data is also available from www.google.com\finance for periods up to 1 year. Google also has current real time data. MSN Money also offers free historical data but with download limitations.


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

3 Comments so far

  1. Ken Drees on August 25, 2009 1:09 pm

    Thanks Phil. Feeling more confident already!

  2. Sean on August 26, 2009 4:11 pm

    In the 80yrs of data that Phil so kindly linked to if you tally up the total return (without dividends) for each month of september, you get 31 instances of positive returns, and 49 instances of negative returns. Median return of -0.82% with a standard deviation of 5.87%…

    5 Worst Months:
    Sep 1931: -30.7%
    Sep 1930: -14.8%
    Sep 1937: -12.9%
    Sep 2002: -12.4%
    Sep 2001: -11.1%

    5 Best Months:
    Sep 1939: +11.7%
    Sep 1954: +7.3%
    Sep 1973: +6.7%
    Sep 1996: +4.7%
    Sep 1958: +4.6%

    That’s as far as I got with it - it would be interesting to see how this data compares to other months…

  3. Russell Sears on August 28, 2009 9:39 am

    Jan. Feb. Mar Apr May Jun
    -9.0% -11.6% -10.7% -9.5% -9.0% -9.0%
    -8.0% -9.7% -6.6% -6.4% -6.8% -8.5%
    -7.4% -6.2% -4.7% -6.3% -6.3% -7.5%
    -7.1% -4.9% -4.4% -4.4% -6.1% -6.0%
    -6.3% -4.0% -3.4% -4.2% -5.6% -5.7%

    7.1% 5.1% 5.1% 7.4% 5.0% 4.4%
    7.5% 5.8% 5.4% 7.7% 5.2% 4.5%
    11.2% 6.5% 6.7% 7.8% 5.3% 4.7%
    11.6% 6.8% 8.2% 8.2% 5.7% 5.3%
    12.4% 6.9% 9.2% 9.0% 8.8% 7.9%

    Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
    -8.2% -15.8% -12.7% -24.5% -12.1% -6.2%
    -8.1% -9.9% -11.7% -18.6% -8.9% -4.3%
    -7.0% -9.5% -9.5% -9.6% -8.3% -4.2%
    -6.2% -8.1% -8.9% -7.1% -7.8% -3.4%
    -6.0% -6.6% -8.5% -4.4% -5.5% -3.1%

    6.6% 5.2% 5.2% 6.1% 7.2% 5.5%
    7.1% 5.9% 5.3% 7.7% 7.2% 5.6%
    7.2% 6.9% 5.4% 8.3% 7.8% 7.0%
    7.5% 10.1% 6.1% 10.5% 9.7% 8.3%
    8.5% 11.0% 8.0% 15.1% 9.7% 10.6%

    The Worst 5 and best 5 returns on S&P index for
    each month since 1950.

Archives

Resources & Links

Search