A pedestrian passes in front of a statue of a bull in the Wall Street area in New York City.
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This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.
What you need to know today
The bottom line
November is one of my favorite months of the year. The weather starts getting chilly as the wet and blustery monsoon, bringing cold November rain, sweeps across Southeast Asia.
Markets also like November, though for completely different reasons. They like heat, and November brings it.
Over the past decade – and even in an election year – November’s been the best trading month, on average, for the S&P 500, according to Carson Group data. The last time the S&P fell more than 1% in November was during the global financial crisis of 2008.
That observation’s corroborated by Goldman Sachs, which notes that Oct. 28 marks the beginning of “the best trading period of Q4 for U.S. equities with data going back to 1928,” wrote Scott Rubner, the bank’s managing director for global markets.
Markets did indeed rise yesterday. The S&P added 0.27%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.65% and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.26%. That added to the S&P’s year-to-date gain, which stands at 22.1%.
That strong showing in the earlier part of the year boosts November’s seasonal effect even more, according to Bank of America’s Chief Equity Technical Strategist Stephen Suttmeier.
“When the SPX is up YTD through October, which is the likely scenario for 2024, the index is up 79% of the time for the November-December period on average,” wrote Suttmeier in a Monday note.
Before getting too excited, however, keep in mind analysts are bullish on stocks over a two-month period. The year ahead stretches long and wide: nothing lasts forever, even stocks’ November reign.
— CNBC’s Alex Harring, Pia Singh, Scott Schnipper, Hakyung Kim and Tanaya Macheel contributed to this report.