Welcome to the worst week of the year for stocks — at least historically speaking.
From 1950 through 2015, the 38th week of the year has seen the worst weekly average return for the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock market index, with a loss of 0.61 percent, according to recent research by LPL Financial.
The investment advisory firm continues in a blog post:
Looking at recent action, [the 38th] week has dropped for five straight years and during seven of the past eight years — with six of those seven weekly drops coming in at more than 1%.
Even if this week follows suit, though, LPL Financial notes it “would not view this as a reason to panic.” Experts from two other financial firms expressed similar sentiments to CNBC.
Larry McDonald, managing director at ACG Analytics, and Zachary Karabell, head of global strategy and senior consultant at Envestnet, say they would pay more attention to monetary policy and politics that could affect financial markets.
For example, the central banks of both the U.S. and Japan met this week, and the first debate for the U.S. presidential election is set for Monday.
As Karabell concluded in his thoughts about the 38th week:
“I think any wise investor and certainly any trader would do well to pay attention to those patterns, that’s about as far as I would go with that.”
If you still find yourself worrying about the 38th week or about world or national events with the potential to affect financial markets, try working on your investing fear itself.
In June, Great Britain left the European Union, causing panic in financial markets. But at that time, Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson wrote:
“Fear of losing money is something we all have to confront when investing in anything other than an insured bank account. It’s natural to be concerned when the market gets scary, and this is a scary time. Which makes it the perfect time to review our rules to overcoming investing fear.”
For more on Stacy’s seven golden rules of overcoming investing fear — regardless of events that might heighten your fear — check out “Brexit Panic — Should You Sell Your Stocks?”
How do you squelch investing fears? Let us know below or on Facebook.
Add a Comment
Our Policy: We welcome relevant and respectful comments in order to foster healthy and informative discussions. All other comments may be removed. Comments with links are automatically held for moderation.