Stocks and the Trump Effect: What Say Tea Leaves?

So much for the “January barometer.”

During the first five trading days of this year, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 6 percent, the worst start to a new year ever for investors.

For all of January, it dropped 5.5 percent, the worst January since 2009 and the depths of the financial crisis.

For followers of the Stock Trader’s Almanac and others who look for patterns in the stock market, those were resounding portents of financial doom.