SPY: A Perfect March

With no down days since February, the S&P 500 tracking ETF (SPY) is now riding a twelve-day winning streak.  Since SPY began trading in 1993, the only other period where the ETF had a twelve-day winning streak was back in September 1995.  Even though SPY has been up for twelve straight days, the magnitude of the gain we have seen over that period is probably a lot less (4.4%) than most people would have expected.  This is causing some investors to worry that the market is losing momentum.  We would note, however, that SPY also rallied less than five percent during the 1995 rally (4.9%), and back then the market's upside momentum continued nearly uninterrupted through 1997.