Benford's Law as Applied to Stock Prices

Benford's law states that in some real-life sets of numerical data the  number 1 appears as the first digit about 30% of the time and 9 appears less than 5% of the time. 

Here are the expected proportions of the leadings digits (1-9) according to the law:

1 30.1%
2 17.61%
3 12.49%
4 9.69%
5 7.92%
6 6.69%
7 5.8%
8 5.12%
9 4.58%

Benford's law applies to many groups of stock prices. Here are four examples. Will take a few seconds to display:

State Street® Financial Select Sector SPDR® ETF (XLF)

State Street® Materials Select Sector SPDR® ETF (XLB)

State Street® Technology Select Sector SPDR® ETF (XLK)

PHLX Semiconductor (^SOX)

Related Calculators

All Stock Calculators