Four score? How markets have fared on leap days

The call for this week: There have now been 37 trading sessions in 2012 and so far the S&P 500 has yet to experience a 1% Downside Day. This 37-session, or more, skein has occurred 11 other times in the past 84 years and has on every occasion except one seen the equity markets higher by the end of the year. Still, the rise since the “buying stampede” ended, which stopped on January 26, 2012 at Dow 12841.95, has felt unnatural to me. Surprisingly, the Industrials reside only 141 points above their intraday high of January 26th causing one market maven to exclaim, “no wonder I feel like we’re in the Trading Twilight Zone.” Maybe there will be a resolution to that “unnatural feeling” this week when we experience Leap Day (February 29th). As our friends at Bespoke write, “There have been 21 leap days in which the market was open since 1900. . . . The average performance of the Dow on leap days has been -0.05% with a median return of -0.22%. . . . There have been three leap days that fell on a Wednesday (as it does this year) since 1900, and the index has risen once and fallen twice. The last leap day was February 29, 2008, and that day the Dow had a big fall of 2.51%.” I’ll speak to you next week.