[CNBC] Stocks had their best January gains in more than 30 years, and that should mean 2019 will be a pretty good year for the market.That’s what the widely watched January barometer tells you ‐ so goes January, so goes the year. According to Stock Trader’s Almanac, going back to 1950, that metric of January’s performance predicting the year has worked 87 percent of the time.
But the indicator also signaled a positive year last year, and the market suffered an unusual late-year sell off, wiping out all of the gains. The S&P 500 ended 2018 down 6.6 percent, despite rising 5.6 percent in January. But the S&P also defied history with a terrible December decline of 9.6 percent, the biggest loss for the final month of the year since 1931.
This January, the S&P 500 was up 7.9 percent. That would be the best January performance since 1987, when it rose 13.2 percent.