Historical Market Performance on Leap Days
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 01:40PM Next Wednesday the 29th is a leap day. For you market historians out there, below we highlight the Dow's performance on leap days since 1900.
There have been 21 leap days in which the market was open since 1900. As shown below, it hasn't historically been a great day. The average performance of the Dow on leap days has been -0.05% with a median return of -0.22%. The Dow has only been positive on 7 of the 21 leap days (33%).
There have been three leap days that fell on a Wednesday (which is the day leap day is on this year) since 1900, and the index has risen once and fallen twice. The last leap day was February 29th, 2008, and that day the Dow had a big fall of 2.51%.
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