Could the High Holidays be affecting the stock market?
A respected trader and former altar boy shares some Jewish financial wisdom on CNBC

Closing numbers of the NYSE on Sept. 22, 2022. Photo by Getty/Angela Weiss/ Contributor
The stock market’s in trouble for a lot of reasons. Could the Days of Awe be a contributing factor?
Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services, went on CNBC to opine that the plunge in the market may come down to familiar “cycles and traditions,” some of them Jewish. (But no, I don’t think he’s blaming the Jews for the stock market, per se.)
“Rosh Hashanah happens at sundown on Sunday,” Cashin said, “and when I was an Irish altar boy in Jersey City, I was told that that tradition is you sell on Rosh Hashanah to buy back on Yom Kippur, cause you wanna be without worldly goods. So I think that may be adding, believe it or not, to some of the mild selling pressure we’re seeing today.”
I’m not sure there’s an ironclad theological rationale for what Cashin is saying. And he might have phrased it better to make it sound less like the Jews were responsible for driving the markets down (we all know where that line of thinking ends). But apparently there is a long tradition of buying and selling in the manner he described — but it appears to be more practical advice vis-à-vis market trends than anything else.
“Sell on Rosh Hashanah and buy on Yom Kippur” is something of a maxim. The origins, per a Real Money article, may go back to financier Bernard Baruch selling at the Head of the Year out of respect for his Jewish mother and, in so doing, dodging a major crash.
According to the Stock Trader’s Almanac analysis of data, the informal tradition has proved a prudent move over the years. From 1971 to 2018 there were 22 years of advancing stocks and 26 of declining stocks between the two holidays.
“Perhaps it’s Talmudic wisdom [it isn’t] but, selling stocks before the eight-day span of the high holidays has avoided many declines, especially during uncertain times,” Christopher Mistal, of Stock Trader’s Almanac told Market Watch in 2017 (a year that, challenging conventional wisdom in a small way, saw a .9% change between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.)
I’m not qualified to give you financial advice, though the writing may well already be on the wall for Wall Street’s current trajectory. While God is cracking open his Book of Life, Jews far savvier than myself may want to look over their own books.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.