Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

As we wrap up August, you will inevitably see articles how we are entering a terrible period for the market – Sep and Oct. However, it’s not true. In fact, what if I told you the best month ever was in October?

Here is the Minimum, lowest 10%, Q1 (lowest 25%), average, Q3 (75% highest), 90% highest, and maximum return for the stock market since 1950.

You can see October has 2 outlier returns. 1987 – which by the way the market was back in just a few months and 1974.

If you remove those two outliers, you can see there is no difference between Sep and Oct and other months.

This doesn’t change the fact the market is way expensive or that we have COVID or an election etc. But there is no reason to expect the market to decline just because it’s Sept or Oct.

NASDAQ in 1990 Territory

One of the most interesting things in the stock market right is the NASDAQ vs. the SP500/Dow. Here is the cumulative return of the three indices since 1985.

Generally, you can see the indices all follow each other. However, you can see the 1990s Internet bubble is one place the NASDAQ pulled away. 2020 is another.

In fact, the NASDAQ has got vertical here in 2020 and the difference between the indices is close to an all time high. Note this isn’t because of AAPL, AMZN, etc because those are in the S&P 500.

The question is: will these indices come back together again? And if they do is that because the S&P500 goes up a lot? Or the NASDAQ comes down a lot?