The market gods are taking it right down to the wire, but the S&P 500 looks like it’s finally going to have back to back positive days! Heading into Tuesday, the S&P 500 had only seen five up days during the entire month, and none of those daily gains came back to back with each other. Yesterday and today have been a different story, though, as the S&P 500 is not only on pace for back to back gains, but also back to back gains of more than 1.5%! The last time that happened was back in June 2016 just after the Brexit vote.
Even with back to back gains Tuesday and Wednesday, this month’s showing will still be weak, to say the least. Since the lows of the Financial Crisis in March 2009, October will go down as only the fifth month where the S&P 500 had only one or no instances of back to back gains in a given month. The last occurrence was a year and a half ago in April 2017, and surprisingly enough, the S&P 500 was actually up during that month! The other three instances were in March and November 2015, when there was just one instance of back to back daily gains, as well as May 2010 when the S&P 500 had no instances of back to back gains. May 2010 was also similar to this October because we saw the largest sell program this month since the Flash Crash back on 5/6/10. Finally, along with May 2010, there have only been six other months in the post-WWII period where an entire month passed without a single instance of back to back gains. Thankfully, it’s almost over!
