Streaks, Part I

A streak of returns is an unbroken set of up or down days, weeks or months. For example, if the market went up on each of the last four days, then it is a streak of 4 daily returns. Can streaks predict the direction of subsequent returns? Before we answer that, let us look at the density plots of up and down streaks over different periods of time. In the charts below, green lines represent positive returns and red represent the negative ones.

Distribution of NIFTY 50 daily return streaks:

Distribution of NIFTY 50 weekly return streaks:

Distribution of NIFTY 50 monthly return streaks:

Looks like something could be done with monthly returns. Click through to Part II for a quick backtest!

Code and images are on github.

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