The January effect is a calendar-related market anomaly in the financial market where financial security prices increase in the month of January. This creates an opportunity for investors to buy stock for lower prices before January and sell them after their value increases.
Therefore, the main characteristics of the January Effect are an increase in buying securities before the end of the year for a lower price, and selling them in January to generate profit from the price differences.
The recurrent nature of this anomaly suggest that the market is not efficient, as market efficiency would suggest that this effect should disappear.
The January Effect was first observed in, or before, 1942 by investment banker Sidney B. Wachtel. It is the observed phenomenon that since 1925, small stocks have outperformed the broader market in the month of January, with most of the disparity occurring before the middle of the month.
The most common theory explaining this phenomenon is that individual investors, who are income tax-sensitive and who disproportionately hold small stocks, sell stocks for tax reasons at year end (such as to claim a capital loss) and reinvest after the first of the year. Another cause is the payment of year end bonuses in January. Some of this bonus money is used to purchase stocks, driving up prices. The January effect does not always materialize; for example, small stocks underperformed large stocks in January 1982, 1987, 1989 and 1990.
Read more about January Effect: Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words january and/or effect:
“Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days—whatever there may be for the dust—the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I have witnessed, and greatly enjoyed, the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)