The Dow By Days of the Week

I was number-crunching and I came across a remarkable stat. Here are the compounded gains for the Dow by days of the week from March 1, 1986 to the end of 2017.

Mondays +94.60%

Tuesdays +259.11%

Wednesdays +107.54%

Thursdays +5.46%

Fridays -5.43

That’s the compounded gain, meaning if you had solely invested on those days.

Here are the number of trading days per day of the week:

Mondays 1,517

Tuesdays 1,645

Wednesdays 1,647

Thursdays 1,614

Fridays 1,603

It’s so skewed toward the start of the week. In fact, if we combine Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then we see that the Dow has gained 1,350.33% on 4,809 days. Meanwhile, Thursday and Friday have lost -0.27% on 3,217 days.

That means the Dow’s entire gain, excluding dividends, has come during the first three days of the week. Thursday and Friday do nothing.

If we add everything up, that’s 8,028 trading days for a return of 1,346.36%. That aligns with the Dow going from 1,709.06 on February 28, 1986 to 24,719.22 on December 29, 2017.

Posted by Eddy Elfenbein on January 4th, 2018 at 8:46 am

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