25-Year Historical Data Analysis Predicts Modest Easter Monday Dow Bump
The Dow has been historically sluggish after Easter weekend but Monday's trading session could see a bump.| Source: Shutterstock
By CCN.com: A CCN.com historical analysis of the Dow Jones industrial average index’s performance the day after Easter over the last 25 years indicates a modest gain on Easter Monday.
How you might use this information on Easter Monday trading depends on your investment and savings strategy, with some contextualization regarding 2019’s equity markets.
Dow Usually Gets A Small Bump on Easter Monday
On April 4, 1994, the Dow opened at 3635.39 after the Easter weekend break. It lost 42.04 points by the market close on Easter Monday that year.
The following three years’ of Easter Mondays were all routs. Then there were four years of daily gains, and so on back and forth over the course of the new millennium.
The absolute worst Easter Monday for the 30 companies whose stock values comprise the Dow Jones index was last year. The Dow lost 432.41 points for the day on April 2, 2018.
You have to go back to 1999 for the Dow’s best post-Easter daily performance. It was an increase in the DJIA of 171.21 points. Of course, this big jump in average prices and last year’s big drop were outliers for the U.S. equities benchmark.
Refining The Dow Easter Monday Trading Data
Over the last 25 years of Easter Monday trading, the Dow has posted an average loss of 1.28 points. But if we cut out some outlier noise by eliminating the one worst and one best day from the data, then the Dow averages a gain of 9.96 the day after Easter according to historical performance for the past quarter century.
Say you’re a day trader who’s sensitive to the market’s daily and weekly movements. This information might be more important to you than someone who is buying and holding stocks to save for years or decades.
This is a very tight data set. Even with the two extreme outliers included, the standard deviation from the mean is approximately 0.00000000000024. Standard deviation is the average of the difference between each value in the set and the average of the values in the set.
Dow Predictions
So based on the information presented in this article alone you might conservatively bet the Dow will jump 10 points over the Easter Monday trading session on the NYSE.
Contextualizing the historical data with recent events gives the Dow a rosy outlook Monday. The financial industry is recovering well from 2018’s bear market. And U.S. employment is at a 50-year high. Meanwhile, massive inflows are driving big growth on Wall Street.
But I’ll keep my guess conservative. From the data, I predict a Dow Jones closing price of 26569.50 on Easter Monday. Leave your prediction in the comments!
Then check back and we’ll see whose guess came closest.
