By Greg Peel<\/p>\n
It’s that time of the year when we hope we haven’t been caught out by any silly stories and that time of the month when FNArena has a look at historical monthly trends, courtesy of the analysts at Barclays Capital.<\/p>\n
And the good news is that – assuming history is any guide at all – the odds are stacked in favour of the All Ordinaries index finishing higher for the month of April. The odds for an advance are 79%, according to Barclays, which is a very high score. Over the past 30 years, the best ever monthly advance was 15.4% and the worst result was a 6.6% decline. The past three Aprils have all been winners (implying 2005 wasn’t).<\/p>\n
Indeed of the 15 major world indices Barclays analyses, all of them show better than 50% odds of an advance in April ranging from the All Ords as top odds to India’s Sensex at 55%. The US S&P 500, analysis for which goes back to 1950, rates a strong 69% which is also heartening given Australia is unlikely to outperform if Wall Street is down the tubes.<\/p>\n
On the commodities front, copper has had a three-year April winning streak but only shows 55% odds of advancing on the longer term scale. Natural gas has the highest April odds among commodities with 67% while oil rates almost even money at 52%. The worst performer of the major commodities is aluminium with only a 33% chance of a rise.<\/p>\n
Gold is not convincing at 56% while silver’s chances are rather negative at 39%.<\/p>\n
It’s a toss of the coin at 50% for whether the Aussie dollar goes up or down but the Kiwi dollar has the best odds of 17 different currencies pairs analysed by Barclays, showing a 61% chance of gaining over the month against the greenback.<\/p>\n
On the fixed interest side of things, we find that Australian 10-year government bonds are also a chance to rise in price over April despite the stock market odds. Barclays measures the odds of a yield increase (price fall) on the Aussie bond at 39% (or call that 61% the other way around).<\/p>\n
And there you have it. If history chooses not to repeat, don’t come looking for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
History shows April is usually a cracker month for the Australian stock market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,21,29,24,22],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55310"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}