Tim Russert used to sign off from each week’s episode of Meet the Press with the tagline, “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.”  Borrowing from that phrase, the Nasdaq’s tagline might as well be “If it’s Monday, it’s Meet the Nasdaq.”  With a gain of over 3% today, the Nasdaq is doing what it always does on Mondays – rally!  The chart below shows the year-to-date performance of the Nasdaq so far in 2020 as well as its performance if you only owned the index on Mondays.   Year to date, the Nasdaq is up an impressive 32.7%, putting it on pace for the first back-to-back annual gain of over 30% since 1998 and 1999. Even crazier, though, is the fact that the Nasdaq is up over 20% year-to-date on Mondays alone!  The weekday that most people love to hate has been responsible for more than 60% of this year’s Nasdaq gain.

In the table below we summarize the performance of the Nasdaq by weekday so far in 2020.  Monday’s average daily gain of 0.57% with gains more than 75% of the time is both the best average daily return and the most consistent to the upside.  Tuesdays and Wednesdays haven’t been particularly bad for the Nasdaq either.   Both days have seen an average one-day gain of 0.30% or more, and Wednesday has been positive three-quarters of the time.  While the first three trading days of the week have been strong, Thursday and Friday have been days to forget.  Although both days have also experienced positive returns more than half of the time, the average one-day change for both is negative resulting in declines on a cumulative.  Thursday has been the weakest with a cumulative decline of 11.53% while Friday’s cumulative decline has been more modest at just 3.46%.  TGIM.  Click here to view Bespoke’s premium membership options for our best research available.