Best Time to Invest? First Trading Day of the Month

So far this decade, the market hasn’t done very well except for one small phenomenon—the first trading day of the month. Through Thursday, the S&P 500 is down 39.5% for the decade. But the market has returned over 21% on the first day of the month (neither figure includes dividends).

What’s interesting is that first days of the month occur less than 5% of the time, so sitting out the rest of the time would have been a smart strategy. How’d you like a job that probably improved your performance if you took vacation over 20 days a month?

Comments

[jeandit75:]

Useless info

May 24 06:59 AM

[Steve Armst...:]

Interesting but confusing. Is it the 1st day of every month or the 1st trading day?

May 24 08:43 AM

[Fred Voetsch:]

Long ago I recall a similar bit of info that suggested that buying on the last day of a month with a holiday very early the next month provided exceptional returns.

This is only useless to an unimaginative investor with no discipline to take advantage of such information.

Put this little bit together with all the other things you have learned and pretty soon you are outperforming the market by several percent and that can mean a lot of extra money when you retire.

May 25 02:49 PM