January Barometer

Witches believe you can learn a lot about your own life by reading your tea leaves at the bottom of your mug. Others think that you can predict the stock market’s performance for the rest of the year by only looking at its January performance, known as the January barometer.

The January barometer hypothesis is that if the stock market goes up in January, it’ll also go up in December, at the end of the year. This shockingly simplistic stock market barometer was not-so-shockingly hypothesized in the early 1970s.

Even though it’s a simple thought, it’s true that the S&P 500 rises for the rest of the year if it does so in January, and vice versa, if you look at historical trends. The predictive power of the January barometer was actually all right for a decade...until the 1980s (we all know a lot happened in the '80s).

Better to have thought and been wrong than to have not thought at all.