Calendar Effects

Do stock prices move systematically at the turn of calendar months? In the July 2006 draft of their paper entitled “Equity Returns at the Turn of the Month”, Wei Xu and John McConnell examine equity returns from the beginning the last trading day of one month through the first three trading days of the next month. Using daily returns for a broad range of stocks across exchanges over the period 1926-2005 (with focus on the segment 1987-2005), they conclude that: Keep Reading

The Halloween effect suggests that investors should be in stocks during November through April and in cash during May through October. Is there a connection between the January effect and the Halloween effect, or are they distinct market anomalies? In their March 2006 paper entitled “Halloween or January? Yet Another Puzzle”, Brian Lucey and Shelly Zhao examine seasonal returns to determine whether the Halloween effect is just an imprecise reflection of the January effect. Using monthly return data for U.S. stocks allocated to capitalization-based size deciles over the period 1926-2002, they conclude that: Keep Reading

In case you are sick of hearing about the January effect… Keep Reading

In their October 2005 paper entitled “The January Effect”, Mark Haug and Mark Hirschey examine the persistence of the January effect (abnormally high rates of return during the month of January). Using broad samples of value-weighted and equally-weighted returns spanning 1802-2004 for large-capitalization stocks and 1927-2004 for small-capitalization stocks, they conclude that: Keep Reading

In the January 2005 version of their working paper entitled “Testing the Significance of Calendar Effects”, Peter Reinhard Hansen, Asger Lunde and James Nason test a broad range of possible calendar effects in multiple equity markets. They examine the following effects: day-of-the-week, month-of-the-year, day-of-the-month, week-of-the-month, semi-month, turn-of-the-month, end-of-the-year and holiday. Calendar effects could be a result of data mining (finding anomalies of randomness), an especially plausible explanation when theoretical explanations are suggested only subsequent to empirical “discovery.” Applying robust tests to daily closing prices of stock indices from Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States through early May 2002, they find that: Keep Reading

In their August 2005 draft paper entitled “Seasonal, Size and Value Anomalies”, Ben Jacobsen, Abdullah Mamun and Nuttawat Visaltanachoti examine the Halloween (or sell-in-May) effect (significantly higher returns during winter months than during summer months) and its relationship to the January effect and other anomalies for both equal-weighted and value-weighted U.S. market portfolios. Other anomalies they consider include those based on on firm capitalization, dividend yield, book-to-market ratio, earnings-to-price ratio and cash flow-to-price ratio. Using the Fama-French data library for 1926-2004, they find that: Keep Reading

In the December 2004 draft of their paper on “Gone Fishin’: Seasonality in Speculative Trading and Asset Prices” Harrison Hong and Jialin Yu examine the effect of vacation periods (summer in the U.S. and January-February in China) on speculative stocks during 1992-2003. They find that: Keep Reading