The Dog Days of March?

Talk about a dead market over the past two trading days!  The S&P 500 was down just 2 basis points (-0.02%) on Friday and up just 5 basis points (+0.05%) today.  How often do we see consecutive trading days with moves of less than +/-5 basis points?  Hardly ever.  Over the last 50 years, there have only been 94 of these 2-day occurrences.  With a total of 12,587 2-day trading periods over the last 50 years, consecutive trading days that both see moves of less than +/-5 basis points only occur about 0.7% of the time (or every 134 trading days).  The market is much more likely to have consecutive trading days with moves of more than +/1%.  These moves occur 6.6% of the time, or every 15.22 trading days.

Below are all of the back to back S&P 500 moves of less than +/-5 basis points since 2000.  As shown, prior to today, the last one happened on July 21st, 2008.  Only 1 occurred in 2008, 2007, 2002, and 2000, 2 occurred in 2006, 3 occurred in both 2005 and 2004, and none occurred in 2009, 2003 or 2001.  The median change of the S&P 500 on the day after these events has been 0.22% since 2000.  The median change over the next week has been -0.10%.

If you're wondering, the S&P 500 has only had back to back to back moves of +/-5 basis points 13 times over the last 50 years.  That's about once every thousand trading days.