By coinnews 
00:00 Jared Blikre
Every investor has heard some version of the old adage, you can’t time the market. But as it turns out, the days and times you invest can have an impact. I’m Jared Blikre, host of Stocks in Translation. So let’s jump into this. First chart is the S&P 500 going back to the beginning of the last bull market, and currently we’re technically still in in it. And we can see that in this white line that I’m outlining right here. And moving with it, I’ve divided the day into two different periods, the regular trading hours, which is 9:30 to 4:00 p.m. and that’s in green, and you can see it was going up pretty closely with the overall market until about the third quarter of last year when it started trending down. In blue here, I have the overnight market. So this is 4:00 p.m. till 9:30 a.m. the next morning. And this is important because the overall market tends to follow the direction of the overnight market more. Why would this be? Because there are 17 and a half hours in the overnight market, and there’s only six and a half in the regular trading hours. So what’s interesting here is the blue line was following the regular market, but then they both took a nose dive, and we saw a lot more event risk coming out overnight. And that’s typically what happens is you see a lot of news occurring outside of the normal trading hours, and then they get priced in during the day in very volatile pricing cycles. So here’s another chart. I still have the overnight price action, and here it’s in orange, but then I’ve broken down the regular trading hours day into three different components. In white, we have 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., so that’s the first two hours of trading. Then we have a lunch period, the middle two and a half hours of the day. And then finally, we have the 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. And what’s interesting is I noticed that the regular trading hours, as I just said a minute ago, were trending down since about the last, the third quarter of last year. And meanwhile, the lunch period stayed kind of, uh, stayed kind of quiet, and then recently, it jumped up. It’s a little bit hard to see because there’s a lot going on in the chart. But suffice to say, the biggest day gains of the day should not be made during the liquid hours of the lunch period. So that’s just kind of an anomaly. And it just speaks as to the random price action that we’re seeing. This is an event-driven market, and it’s not operating according to the same playbook that the rest of the bull market going back to 2022 was operating on. Uh, I’m going to close with this chart. This takes a different look. It divides, uh, the trading, the trading epic into days of the week. So we have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. What stand, and this goes back to the beginning of the year, by the way. What stands out is Wednesdays, they have now jumped up, and that’s because Wednesday was one of the best days ever for the S&P 500. So you might think, well, Wednesdays are great now. Not necessarily. I want to reiterate this is an event-driven market where a lot of the market moves just happened to coincide with the timing of all these news events. And that would be the purview of the president of the United States who’s making all these announcements. Uh, back to the chart, Thursdays are looking particularly bad, but that’s just because we had two Thursdays in a row that were actually pretty bad. In fact, some of the worst days that we’ve had since the pandemic. The other days looking kind of sloppy as well. So as, uh, I guess I’m going to close here by saying this isn’t really an invitation to time the market based on what I’m telling you. It’s more of an indication that things have really changed, and to get back to normal, we’re going to have to start seeing some participation in the overnight pricing action that’s favorable. So we want to see the market gap up in the morning and ideally continue that direction up through the end of the day. So tune into Stocks and Translation for more jargon busting deep dives. New episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays on Yahoo Finance’s website or wherever you find your podcast.