Santa Claus Rally
November 26th, 2009
Markets tend to react to the outside events. Markets react to the seasons. Markets react to holidays. Markets react to political crisis. Markets are what the people are thinking. The day before the President’s day is the worst day and the day after the Easter is the worst day after. However, you should keep in mind that a lot of other factors also come into play and you have a lot of room for error. The next best holiday bets are the Labor Day and the Memorial Day because they fall before the first day of trading in September and June respectively.
The best time of the year to own stocks is the Santa Claus rally which for all practical purposes is the 17 day stretch from December 21 to January 7. This is the best time of the year. Most of the folks usually feel fairly good about themselves around this time of the year.
FED tends to lower interest rates during holidays in order to go into the New Year with less of a worry if the economy is slowing down. There is a low trading volume which tends to exaggerate the trend if the economy is not doing well and is slowing down. However, when you are dealing with seasonality, you should keep these facts in your mind:
1) The market is not longer static. Money has no borders now. With one mouse click money is transferred from one locality to another. The seasonal effect may get interrupted by other events. More and more people have real time access to information and larger amounts of capital than at any time in the past.
2) Institutional investors like mutual funds, hedge funds and insurance companies have become important players in the markets. So in case of an event free environment, seasonal tendencies may hold up fairly well. At the end of the year, institutional investors want to make their results look as good as possible to their shareholders and tend to buy the stocks and so on.
3) The days of long term investing or what you call buy and hold are dead! Frequent market crashes have taught the investing public that investing for the long term is fairly risky. So there is more short term trading going on. These are the times for day traders and swing traders. With fewer people willing to hold stocks for longer periods, it is very difficult to predict seasonality.
4) The recent market crash was the result of CMO and Default Swaps bringing down the banks and Insurance companies in ways that had not been anticipated or foreseen by the analysts. Many had assumed that derivate securities are safe. Infact they have highly unpredictable tendencies. Derivates and outside the market trading activities can result in highly unpredictable patterns.
Then there is a change in demographics also taking place. With the aging of the population, the overall trend will be towards more income producing investments. So with everyone talking about the seasonal tendencies in the market, it reliability becomes less diminished.
Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Try these cash printing Forex Signals from heaven. First trade on your Forex Demo Account! Click here to get your own unique version of this article with free reprint rights.