The Dow Jones Industrial Average (Index: DJI) ranks among the world's oldest stock market indices. Created by Charles Dow in 1884, the price-weighted index originally included just 11 stocks, which was later expanded to 20 firms in 1916 and finally to 30 companies in 1928.
Over the years, the membership of the DJI has changed, with companies being periodically removed and replaced. Today, the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) has largely replaced the Dow Jones Industrials as the major index that's most representative of the most of the U.S. stock market, but the much longer history of the DJI has given it a popular staying power. For decades, it was *the* index that summarized the state of the U.S. stock market.
We're tapping a large part of that history today in a project exploring winning and losing streaks for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We pulled the index' price data through Measuring Worth's DJI database, which documents the daily closing value of the index for each trading day from 2 May 1885 onward. We tallied up the number of up days and down days for the index, then grouped them into winning and losing streaks based on how many days they lasted.
The following chart summarizes our results, presenting the number of times a winning or losing streak of the indicated number of days was recorded. The inset chart shows the frequency of winning and losing streaks as a percentage of the 38,131 trading days of the available DJI price data, which runs through 21 February 2025.
Some quick observations. Winning streaks are more common than losing streaks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The longest streaks lasted 14 trading days, for which there is one example of each.
"Single day" streaks are the most common, representing a little over 48% of the total, with nearly an equal number of up and down days. Two day long streaks account for more than 25% of the total, with two-day long winning streaks covering 13.4% of the index' total number of trading days and two-day long losing streaks covering nearly 12%. Longer streaks rapidly become less and less common.
The DJI data includes 209 days in which the level of the index did not change from its previous day's closing value, which is not covered in the chart. That makes an unchanged day for the DJI almost as likely as a seven-day long winning streak for the index!
The longest streak in which the DJI was unchanged is three trading days, which has happened three times in the index' history. The most recent occurrence of that phenomenon ran from 27 January 1912 through 30 January 1912.
References
Samuel H. Williamson, 'Daily Closing Value of the Dow Jones Average, 1885 to Present,' [Online database]. MeasuringWorth, 2025.
Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and a bear running in a race."
Labels: data visualization, stock prices
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