Your Cheat Sheet to Dow Recoveries Since 1896

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At this point the Dow is 470 market days beyond the 2009 low. The index has risen to 4th place in our Sweet Sixteen competition. It was in 5th place when we last looked on December 17th.

In the first chart, I’ve removed the 1932 data series. The rally following the Crash of 1929 was indeed an outlier — one that consisted of a series of cyclical bull and bear rallies. By removing it, the vertical axis shrinks by half, improving our ability to see the differentiation among the other recoveries. (It also moves our current Dow up a notch to 3rd place.)

Why is inflation adjustment useful for this overlay? Throughout history the cost of living has undergone some dramatic changes, as this chart illustrates. High inflation, such as during the 1974 recovery, gives an exaggerated sense of price growth. Deflation, which accompanied several of the earlier market cycles, makes recoveries appear weaker. By adjusting for the inflationary/deflationary cycles, we get a clearer sense of the real value of the index price across time.

Now let’s extend the time frame. Here is a set of charts with increasing numbers of market days: 500, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, and 5000. Depending on the historical period, the number of market days in a year varies slightly. But it rounds out to about 250 market days per year. So the time frames in this series are approximately 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 years. The series features the 500-day chart with and without the 1932 recovery (Great Depression) for reasons explained above. At 1000 market days, the 1932 recovery continues to lead the pack. But at 2000 days (about eight years), the recovery after the 1921 low has risen dramatically. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that this remarkable advance was the last stage of the Roaring Twenties stock bubble, as the 3000-day (12-year) overlay makes clear. At 4000 days (about 16 years), the recovery from the low in 1982 is approaching the final surge of the Tech Bubble. The 5000-day chart shows how the Tech Bubble played out for the Dow, topping out in January 2000 after a brief scare in 1998 triggered by the Long-Term Capital Management Crisis (that dip after the 4000-day mark). The chart below shows the 5000-day (approximately 20-year) overlay:

Here is a table summarizing the comparative performance of these 16 Dow recoveries at seven points in time.

The overlay charts give visual evidence of the wide range of recovery patterns. The table helps quantify the magnitude of the difference. Two of the earlier recoveries, 1903 and 1914, and two of the later recoveries, 1962 and 1970, subsequently failed. Likewise the 1938 and 1974 rallies failed before being rescued by later recoveries. This last observation touches on an important aspect of the overlay charts. As the timeframe increases, the same recovery may appear in multiple data series.

Cyclical and Secular Markets

How will our current recovery fare during the coming months and years? I’m reluctant to make any inferences based on the overlay charts other than the obvious. History shows us that some recoveries are the beginnings of secular bull markets. Others turn out to be cyclical bear market rallies.

The recovery since March 2009 is the second in the first decade of the 21st century, and it started from a lower low. As we can see in the inflation-adjusted chart below, history has witnessed several other examples of multiple recoveries in relatively close succession with lower starting points. Will the current recovery be another such example? Only time will tell.

Another liberty I took in selecting recoveries for the overlay was to include two rallies after declines of less than 30%. In both cases, they marked the beginning of a new economic era. One is the recovery that began in 1949 after the 23.95% post-war decline. The 12-year, 355% advance that followed warranted inclusion. Likewise I added in the first 500 days of the 250% rally that started in 1982 after a 24.13% decline. The 1982 recovery brought an end to the decade of stagflation and launched the great Boomer bull market. Here’s a larger view of the overlay.

Doug Short Ph.d is the author of dshort.com.

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