Douglas Witte: Finance Professor and Michael Ferguson

douglas witte: The Fed's interest-rate policy and the latest Trump tweet about Chinese tariffs would certainly seem to be far more relevant than Congress' summer holiday, according to Market Watch. But don't be too quick to dismiss this bullish view. What does that have to do with the U.S. market, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.09% has plunged some 1,600 points in the past couple of weeks including almost 800 points on Monday of this week alone. Research conducted by Michael Ferguson, a finance professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Hugh Douglas Witte, a finance professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, found that more than 90% of the capital gains produced by the Dow since its creation in 1896 have come when Congress is out of session. At the 95% confidence level, of course, we should expect that 5% of the myriad patterns we investigate will appear to be statistically significant false positives that are completely worthless to the investor. Of course, one always worries when presented with results such as these that they are spurious, the result of nothing more than a shameless data mining exercise. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.