Evidence for Seasonality and Changes in Seasonal Trends in Indian Stock Market

Seasonality in stock markets is a regular and repetitive phenomenon occurring at some regular intervals of time, which may generate abnormal or excess returns. This paper explores the existence of seasonality in Indian stock market in four forms, namely, day-of-the-week effect, month-of-the-year effect, quarterly effects, and monthly effects. For this purpose, S&P CNX Nifty was taken as the sample. The daily closing, opening, high and low prices were collected from November 3, 1995 to May 31, 2013. ADF test was used for checking stationarity, whereas a dummy variable regression was used for testing seasonality. It was found that all the four effects are present in the Indian stock market. The returns of September, Monday, first quarter and first-half of the month were significantly different. Thus the existence of seasonality in Indian stock markets was proved. All the four effects tested for Nifty indicate that seasonality has changed over the years