Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Surveying the Wreckage of August

A pretty brutal August is now in the books, and although things didn’t turn out quite as bad as they looked at this time last week, the markets still ended up suffering. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the month down 6.6 percent, ending August with its steepest monthly loss since May 2010.

The other major indexes had it about as bad. The S&P 500 index was off by 6.3 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite was down by 6.9 percent. For both those indexes, it was their largest monthly decline since May 2012.

And it’s possible the carnage is not over. According to S&P Capital IQ, there have been 11 other times that the S&P 500 fell by more than 5 percent in August since 1945. The index went on to decline in September as well 80 percent of those times.

No comments:

Post a Comment