Revisiting the Halloween Effect
From Crash Danger to End-of-the-Year Ramp
Knock, knock… it’s Jack, from Wall Street
After the last day of October, the month that has investors in fear of the next big stock market crash follows Halloween – and while this is a spooky day, it actually marks the start of a period that typically tends to yield promising returns for investors.
What is commonly referred to as Halloween Effect or Halloween Strategy is the fact that stock market returns on average turn noticeably positive from late October onward.
This phenomenon has been widely discussed well beyond the confines of experts on seasonality like ourselves and was inter alia subject of several academic studies, with a number of well-known scholars providing valuable contributions (Jacobsen & Visaltanachoti; Haggard & Witte; Maberly & Pierce and many others)*.
We are revisiting the topic in this edition of Seasonal Insights.
The Halloween Effect is a Global Phenomenon
We begin by looking at the first part of the Halloween Effect with the help of the Seasonax Web App (note: details on the web app can be found here; readers of Acting Man qualify for a special discount)
We have analyzed three of the most important stock indexes from around the world to find out whether they exhibit a common pattern. In all three cases the time period from October 31st to January 3rd was reviewed.
Please note that these indexes have been examined with the aim of showing a general trend. One can filter out individual stocks that exhibit the same seasonal patterns, but generate much higher returns.
The first index is the DAX, a composite of the 30 largest German companies. It shows a distinct seasonal pattern in the respective time-period with 77.78% winning trades of and an average annualized return of 34.05%.
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