October slump: a seasonal anomaly, or a bear about to pounce?

“It all seemed to be going so well” this year, says Paul Niven, head of strategy at F&C. Just a couple of weeks ago, bankers and brokers were smugly anticipating huge bonuses, thanks to the remarkable performance of the world’s equity and bond markets throughout 2005 and especially in the third quarter. Then all of a sudden last week things went wrong. The FTSE fell 1.8% in just one day (the anniversary of the 1987 Black Monday crash) and there was a sudden “blow out in bond markets”. And as is usually the case with market moves of such severity and speed, the whole thing took most people by surprise.

"It all seemed to be going so well" this year, says Paul Niven, head of strategy at F&C. Just a couple of weeks ago, bankers and brokers were smugly anticipating huge bonuses, thanks to the remarkable performance of the world's equity and bond markets throughout 2005 and especially in the third quarter. Then all of a sudden last week things went wrong. The FTSE fell 1.8% in just one day (the anniversary of the 1987 Black Monday crash) and there was a sudden "blow out in bond markets". And as is usually the case with market moves of such severity and speed, the whole thing took most people by surprise.

But perhaps it shouldn't have. After all, as Jeremy Warner points out in The Independent, "for stockmarkets, October has always been the cruellest month". And if you look at the numbers, you will see that while the drama came last week, worldwide markets have in fact been falling all month. In the first three weeks, the FTSE 100 fell more than 6.5% and over in the US, things were hardly better. In the same three weeks, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.66%, joined by the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq (3.44% and 4.03% respectively). Around the world, every single major stockmarket has fallen in the last four weeks, from the CAC 40 in France to the Hang Seng in Hong Kong. Even Japan, a MoneyWeek favourite market, at one point last week was down 3% on the month.

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