Back To Back To Back (to Back?)

US equity futures are surging this morning despite Apple’s (AAPL) disappointing earnings report last night. Today’s catalyst is a report that President Trump has asked his cabinet to draft a potential trade deal with China. Optimists are hoping that this will help to ease ongoing trade tensions between the two countries, while skeptics see the timing of the recent reports coming out of the White House as an attempt to goose the market ahead of next week’s midterms. If the S&P 500 can hold on to and build a little bit on its early gains today, it has the potential to post back to back to back to back one-day gains of 1% or more. The last time that happened was the last time the song “Africa” was popular – 1982!

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though, Non-Farm Payrolls was just released with the headline number coming in at 250K versus estimates for an increase of 200K.

With the S&P 500 already up 1% or more for three straight days, the chart below shows prior streaks of daily gains of more than 1% in the post-WWII period. While there have been about 30 prior streaks of three days, only three of those went on to four trading days.