On Tuesday, the Senate approved a bill that would make daylight-saving time permanent—and that could be good news for the stock market.
The Senate passed a bill that would make daylight-saving time the official time of the land all year round. That’s right, no more changing clocks twice a year, though it still needs to be passed by the House and signed into law by the president.
The change probably would probably have less of an impact on daily life than it did, say, a century ago, when more people were farmers. Today, the end of time changes might not even be noticed.
This being Barron’s, we’re more concerned with the potential impact on the stock market, and the folks at Bespoke Investment Group have provided an analysis. They looked at how the S&P 500 has performed during standard time and daylight-saving time and found that the index has gained an average of 7.5% during daylight-saving time but just 2% during standard time since 2007. The gap in median gains isn’t as wide, with the S&P 500 rising a median of 7.5% during daylight savings and a median of 6.5% during standard time.
“If that isn’t reason enough to keep Daylight Savings Time permanent, we don’t know what is!,” Bespoke says.
Of course, there are other, better reasons the market might perform better from March through November than from November through March.
But at least we know it won’t do any harm.
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