Consecutive Days Without A 1% Move By $SPX (Preview)

By Lawrence G. McMillan

Lately, there has been commentary about how the Standard & Poors 500 Index ($SPX) has not made a 1% move (using closing prices) since July 8th.  That’s 36 trading days and counting, through Monday, August 29th.   Is that a long time?  It certainly seems like it is.  It's the longest period of time without a 1% move in over two years.  However, we don’t like to go by “feel,” but rather by statistics, and the statistics show something a bit different.

So we generated a list of the longest periods of time without a 1% move by $SPX.  We looked back to 1990, and it turns out that 36 days is in a two-way tie for the 7th longest period of time between 1% $SPX moves.  That’s a little impressive, I guess, but not very close to the longest such periods.

The longest period of time between 1% moves by $SPX was from July 19, 1995, to November 8, 1995 – 79 trading days.  That exceeded the second longest such time period quite easily – from April 4, 2014, through July 17, 2014, a period of 63 trading days.  How did those two lengthy periods end?  In two somewhat different ways...

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