See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup.  Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day.  Read it now by starting a two-week free trial to Bespoke Premium.  CLICK HERE to learn more and start your free trial.

You couldn’t ask for a better way to start the unofficial Summer trading season.  The S&P 500 is poised to trade back above its 200-day moving average for the first time in weeks.  That may sound like an optimistic trend, but as we noted in the text of today’s report, we were surprised to find that it isn’t always the most positive short-term (week and month) trend for equities.

Be sure to check out today’s Morning Lineup for a rundown of the latest stock-specific news of note, news in global markets, global and national trends related to the COVID-19 outbreak, and much more.

The S&P 500 tracking ETF (SPY) is on pace to gap up over 1.8% this morning.  In the history dating back to 1993, this will be SPY’s 279th 1%+ upside gap and the 62nd occurrence on a Tuesday.  The table below shows the performance of the ETF, broken out by weekday, from the open to close on days when it opens up by at least 1%.  Tuesday upside gaps of 1%+ have been followed by an average open to close gain of 0.34% with positive returns just under 59% of the time. In terms of the average change, this ranks as the second-best weekday behind Wednesday (0.43%), and in terms of consistency it ranks as the third-best behind Wednesday and Friday.

Today’s upside gap is also notable in that it is just the 11th 1%+ upside gap following a three-day weekend.  It may sound pretty hard to believe, but the last time SPY gapped up more than 1% after a three-day weekend was more than four years ago in February 2016.
In the 10 prior instances where SPY gapped up more than 1% after a three-day weekend, it averaged a rest of day gain of 0.31% (median: 0.16%) with positive returns half of the time.  So, basically it was a coinflip.