How many pumpkins and ghosts have you counted so far today? Halloween is looming for some. But this isn’t about decoration, it’s about hard facts.

What is the Halloween Effect on the stock market? Usually the indexes rise from Halloween to the end of the year. Of course not in one go and without interruption. But those who buy at the end of October and sell at the beginning of January are often in the plus. This is what the statistics say for the S&P 500 over the last 25 years. We’ll take a look at the last 10 years now.

In the last 25 years, the Halloween Effect occurred in 76 percent of cases. This means that we only had 6 years in which the S&P 500 did not rise in November and December.

The following data shows the past 10 years. Here we have a hit rate of 70 percent. Negative years were 2015, 2018 and 2022, with only 2018 being really negative with minus 7.44 percent. We are only talking about the period from October 31st to January 1st.

In the last 10 years, the Halloween Effect alone on the S&P 500 has made a profit of 820 points in November and December. On average, the index rose by 2.57 percent during this time, including the loss years.

2020 was particularly lucrative. No wonder. After the Corona low, everything went up again. There were still significant increases in November and December.

What period is even better? End of October to end of November! Here we were even 8 out of 10 times in the plus and the loss for the two outliers was 1 percent each. That’s really something to see!

Regardless of the current signs, according to statistics, November could still be positive. However, the period from late September to late October is usually positive as well – and this year we were negative.

So there are mixed signals again. The market will therefore hardly rise by 10 percent by the end of the year. Or will it? Ironically, October 2020 was down by 2 percent! Afterwards there were the 11.79 percent that you can see above for the last 2 months of the year.

We can hardly draw any conclusions from this. Yes, the market situation is not exciting. If we have a real bear market, it will go down further. If it was only a correction so far, prices can go up again now.

Conclusion All in all, one thing came out of the analysis: November is better than December. So if we pull up again, it will probably be next month rather than towards Christmas.