February Trends

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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From Ticker Sense

It looks like the "First Day of the Month" bullish bias trumped the bearish implications of the month of February, as the S&P 500 finished the day up half a percentage point.  This certainly is a positive as historically speaking, February has typically been a weak month, with an average decline of 0.20%.  As the chart below illustrates, the only month with a weaker record is September as the average decline in that month is 71 basis points. Going off on a tangent, we would note that the returns in October are particularly impressive since that includes 1987 when the S&P 500 declined over 21%.  Ex 1987, October’s average return since 1945 is 1.5%.

While we think it’s always good to be aware of these seasonal tendencies in the market, we would also remind investors that while September is supposed to be the worst month of the year, last year we saw a 2.5% gain during that month which ended up being the third best month for ’06.

Sp_500_average_monthly_returns

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
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.

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