We're off to a pretty good start in the stock market so far in 2013,. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index increased by 5.5 percent in the month of January, which is about half of a good return for an entire year.
But perhaps more importantly, that kind of performance bodes well for the rest of the year. Birinyi Associates looked at the past 50 years, and found only eight other years in which the S&P had risen by 5 percent or more in January. In the ensuing 11 months, not even counting that January increase, the market has added an additional 12.7 percent.
The one time it missed over that period, though, is kind of a cautionary tale. In 1987, the S&P was up 13.2 percent in January. But come October, there was a market crash, and as a result, over the remainder of the year, the S&P was down 9.9 percent. Let's hope we don't see that again.
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