Hulbert: 'Eerie Parallels' Between Current Dow Chart and That of 1929

A chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average going back to July 2012 closely matches one from 1928-29, signaling a crash may be coming later this month or in March, if the correlation continues, says Mark Hulbert, editor of Hulbert Financial Digest.

"There are eerie parallels between the stock market’s recent behavior and how it behaved right before the 1929 crash," he writes in an article for MarketWatch.

He first wrote about the chart on MarketWatch in early December, questioning its validity. But now that the pattern has continued to repeat, he's turning into a believer.

"One of the biggest objections I heard two months ago was that the chart is a shameless exercise in after-the-fact retrofitting of the recent data to some past price pattern," Hulbert notes.

"But that objection has lost much of its force. The chart was first publicized in late November of last year, and the correlation since then certainly appears to be just as close as it was before."

Another objection Hulbert heard was that the Dow soared more than 100 percent in 1928-29, compared with a gain of less than 50 percent in 2012-13.


"But there’s less to this objection than you might think," he notes. "You can still have a high correlation coefficient between two data series even when their gyrations are of different magnitudes.

"You may still be inclined to dismiss this. But there were many more were laughing last November when this scary chart began circulating. Not as many are laughing now."

One market expert who thinks a stock crash is coming is Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. He believes the Federal Reserve's stimulus has led to an overvalued market.

"I think the market is way overdue for a 20 to 30 percent correction," he tells CNBC. "In fact, I'm hoping for the market to drop 40 percent so stocks will again become — from a value point of view — attractive."
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