Heard of the ‘January Trifecta’? I confess, before learning about it in this year’s Stock Trader’s Almanac (Wiley), I had not. Nor had I heard of two of its three contributors.
The Santa Claus Rally, sure. But the inventor of that metric, Yale Hirsch, also came up with the January Barometer (“as the S&P 500 goes in January so goes the year”). Combine both with the 'First Five Days Early Warning System' (a short version of the Barometer), and you get the trifecta.
So what does it tell us? According to the Almanac – which came up with the rubric in 2013 but has been tracking its sub-parts a lot longer – when all three are positive, there’s a more than 91 per cent chance that the index will rise that year, and by an average of 17.7 per cent.