Beginning of the Week Is the Winner

Since 1986, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has had a pretty good run. The index has increased from 1,546.67 on the last day of 1985 to 18,029.85 today. That’s an increase of more than 1,000% in a little over 29 years. Not too shabby.

But here’s an interesting catch—nearly the entire gain has come at the beginning of the week. The combined gain on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday comes to 988.46%. But the combined gain of Thursday and Friday is just 7.10%. That’s an amazing gap.

The Dow’s been taking four-day weekends on us and no one’s noticed! Of course, there’s no way this stat can translate into usable investment advice, but it’s interesting how the market can have a mind of its own. For nearly three decades, all that Thursday and Friday trading has added up to nothing.

Here’s a chart of how the Dow has performed since 1986. I divided it into two lines — the blue line is the combined return of being invested on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The red line is for Thursday and Friday. I baselined both lines to start at 100.

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Posted by on February 19th, 2015 at 11:27 am


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