How long can this go on? Dow losing streaks

Dow weekly losing streaks

Well it's only 2:40 PM but I'm going to take a wild guess that with the Dow now down 150 points on the day so far that we're not only going to end lower on the day but for the entire week as well. That makes it six straight losing weeks in a row now. So the obvious question is now, how long can this go on?  (Or as Devo said, "Lord, how long can this go on?")

I thought it might be interesting to find out what the longest weekly losing streak in the Dow was, and while I'm at it, how the lengths of losing streaks sort out. I took 40 years of weekly Dow data, back to April 1971 (as much data as eSignal would give me) and looked for losing streaks. Here's the results:

 

As you can see, the longest losing streak in the past 40 years is seven. Seven straight down weeks. And there were three of those. The last one occurred in June 2001. You have to go as far back as 1980 and 1973 to find the other two.

Then there were (until now) just eight instances of streaks of length six. That's just 6 times in 2080 weeks.  The last one of those was in October 2002.  The raw numbers by streak length are: [307   119    42    32    13     8     3].

There were no streaks longer than seven weeks. So there you have it. The historical odds favor an up week next week. The chances of next week being down are just 3 in 2080, or about 0.14%. Of course, the keyword here is "historical". We're living in funny times.  I'm keeping my short hat firmly in place for the time being.