The Friday The 13th Effect On The Stock Market
posted on: 2009-11-13 09:24:08 by Soo-Young
tags: stock market commentary

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Would you consider yourself a superstitious investor? If so are, you might have second thoughts about taking any new long positions today, which happens to be Friday the 13th. I'm not too superstitious myself, but I'm always interested in learning more about how anything can affect the stock market. I took it upon myself this morning to look through the history of the Dow to see how it performed on Friday the 13th since 2000. This is what I found. Since 2000, there were a total of 16 Friday the 13th's with an average Dow price movement of -17.92 points. The biggest gain was on June 13, 2008 (+162.76) and the biggest loss was on April 13, 2000 (-209.04). To sum up what I found, the stock market has gone down on average, but not by a significant amount. A -17.92 price movement is nothing to fuss about, so I'd say, in general, the superstition surrounding Friday the 13th has very little affect on the stock market (at least in the past decade).

While I was digging around and learning more about this day, I found something on Wikipedia that I found very interesting. According to a The Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics Study, there were fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft on Friday the 13th compared to any other Friday (for car accident reports, the Friday the 13th average was 7,500 compared to 7,800 of any other Friday). The reasons given for this apparent drop in accidents and reports is that: "people are preventatively more careful or just stay home."

So maybe, investors are being a little more cautious today, tightening up their stop losses, or flat out selling their positions. That is probably the case for some individual investors, but the effect from that I'm sure is quite small. I don't know how the trading strategies at big institutions work, but I doubt there is any specific consideration given to Friday the 13th. Maybe I'm wrong. I think it would be really interesting to learn if big institutions actually accounted for Friday the 13th.