As we noted in today’s Morning Lineup, international equities were generally lower yesterday while US markets were shuttered in observance of President’s Day. The US is continuing the negative tone today with the S&P 500 down roughly 50 bps as of this writing. Of course, seasonality is never the sole reason for the ups and downs of the market, but we would note that today’s weakness is basically par for the course coming back from Monday’s holiday. In the charts below, we show the average daily change and percentage of time with a move higher for the S&P 500 during the week of Presidents’ Day since 1970 when the stock market began to observe the holiday on the third Monday of February.
As shown, historically the S&P 500 has averaged an 18 bps decline the first day back from President’s Day with positive performance less than half the time. Furthermore, assuming the declines hold through the close, today would mark the fifth year in a row that the S&P 500 fell on the Tuesday after President’s Day. Wednesdays and Thursdays of the week of Presidents’ Day have historically seen even more consistently negative price action albeit the average declines are much smaller at 2 bps and 3 bps, respectively. Finally, Friday tends to see a rebound with an average gain of 17 bps and positive performance 57% of the time.
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