Key points
- The Nasdaq closed at 25,913.90 on Monday, up 2.13%. Third green day in a row.
- Those three days added 6.02%, wiping out the 5.4% lost in the six red days that ended July 29.
- Since 1971 the Nasdaq has gone six down then three up 35 times. Day four was green in 11 of the 34 finished cases.
- A normal Nasdaq day closes green 56% of the time.
The Nasdaq closed at 25,913.90 on Monday, August 3. It's up 2.13%, and it's also the third green day in a row.
Those three days added 6.02%! The six red days before took away 5.4%. So the whole slide is gone, and the index is now 0.30% above where it sat on July 21 before any of this started.
| Session | Close | Change |
|---|---|---|
| July 30 | 25,122.18 | +2.78% |
| July 31 | 25,373.85 | +1.00% |
| August 3 | 25,913.90 | +2.13% |
If you own the Nasdaq through an ETF, Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) tracks the Nasdaq 100 rather than the full Composite. It finished Monday up 1.75%.
The streak broke on July 30, when Microsoft's results, a Samsung capacity call and Citadel buying out a leveraged book all landed inside 18 hours. So can we get a fourth green day on Tuesday? We pulled every Nasdaq close going back to 1971 and counted.
What happened the other 34 times
Since February 1971 the Nasdaq has had 86 losing streaks of six days or longer. Thirty-five of them were followed by three straight up days. This is number 35.
Thirty-four of those have a fourth day on the books. The Nasdaq rose on day four 11 times. It fell the other 23.
That's about one in three. On any normal day the Nasdaq finishes green a bit better than one time in two. So day four is where this setup has usually tripped.
Here's how often the index was higher after this setup, next to how often it's higher after a random day.
| Time later | This setup | Normal |
|---|---|---|
| Next day | 32% | 56% |
| About a week | 41% | 58% |
| About two weeks | 44% | 59% |
| About a month | 62% | 61% |
Check the bottom row. A month out, the two columns are the same. Whatever the drag is, it wears off.
It isn't a quirk of the 1970s either. Half of the 34 cases happened before 1990 and half after. Day four was green 5 times out of 17 in the older half and 6 out of 17 in the newer half.
Only one other time did three days erase the whole drop
That was June 28, 1993. The Nasdaq had lost 1.8% over six days and won it back in three. The next day it slipped 0.25%.
One case isn't a pattern, and that 1993 drop was a third the size of this one. It's trivia, not a road map. The six-day losing streak on its own didn't tell us much either. We ran all 85 of them last week and the one-month median came out at 1.5%, the same as a random month pays.
The last time the Nasdaq did put up a fourth straight green day out of this setup was September 12, 2022. It rose 1.27% that day. Ten sessions later it was down 11.9%.
Nasdaq Composite history is figured from daily closes between February 5, 1971 and August 3, 2026, 13,989 sessions in all, sourced from Yahoo Finance. A red day is a close below the day before, a green day is a close above it. This is general market commentary and not investment advice.
