traders work the floor of the new york stock exchange on july 25 2023 in new york city the dow jones industrial average closed negative on thursday breaking a 13day win streak in which the bluechip index gained 53 it also missed the opportunity to tie its longest rally on record a 14session run in 1897 but heres the thing regardless of whether the dow made that 14th straight gain basic probability tells us that we will get this kind of streak every once in a while naturally its sort of like a version of the famous gamblers fallacy in which people erroneously believe that an unusual streak in a roulette wheel means something for future outcomes when youd actually expect long streaks to happen on occasion we can even show that these streaks arent that different from a result of a coin flip cnbc ran a simulated coin flip thousands of times and counted the number of times heads came up in a row treat those like daily gains in the stock market remember these are totally independent events where the outcome is not affected by the prior simulation