Best month on record
+28.07%
May 2009
Nifty 50 Monthly Movement
Every month since 2006, ranked. The best and worst months on record, the calendar months that reliably win and lose, and how stable that seasonality has actually been.
2006-01-02 → 2026-09-25 · 5,117 trading days · 248 complete months analysed
Worst month on record
-26.41%
October 2008
Best calendar month (avg)
+3.41%
April · +71.4% win rate
Worst calendar month (avg)
-1.35%
February · +42.9% win rate
Average monthly return
+1.00%
Median +0.94%
Months finishing higher
+58.1%
104 down months
Longest winning streak
8 months
Consecutive positive months
Longest losing streak
5 months
Consecutive negative months
Every Month Since 2006 — Return in One Chart
Month-end to month-end percentage return for all 248 complete months. This is the whole dataset: the tallest green bar and the deepest red bar are the answer to 'best and worst month'.
Best & Worst Months on Record
The ten largest and ten largest-in-reverse monthly moves. Note that both tails are dominated by two periods — the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID crash and its rebound.
Calendar-Month Seasonality — Average Return
Average return for each calendar month across all years, with error bars spanning ±1 standard deviation. Where the error bar crosses zero, the seasonal edge is inside the noise and is not tradeable.
Calendar-Month Seasonality — Win Rate
Share of years in which each calendar month finished higher. The 50% line is a coin flip; a month sitting just above it is not meaningfully different from one just below.
Distribution of Monthly Returns
How the 248 monthly returns are distributed. The right tail is far fatter than the left — Nifty's monthly losses have historically been capped by circuit breakers, while gains are unbounded.
Is the Seasonality Stable? — By Decade
Average return for each calendar month, split across 2006–09, the 2010s, and the 2020s. A seasonal effect that only exists in one era is a regime artefact, not a calendar effect.
The Two Record Months
May 2009 — the best month on record+28.07%
May 2009 gained +28.07% as the market recovered from the March 2020 COVID low. The single strongest month in two decades of Nifty history — and it is a rebound off a crash extreme, not a sign of ordinary market strength.
October 2008 — the worst month on record-26.41%
October 2008 lost +26.41%as the post-Lehman unwind met the global credit freeze. It traded a 77.6% high-to-low range inside a single month — the widest monthly range in the dataset.
Best 10 Months on Record
| # | Month | Return | Points | Open → Close | Intra-month range | Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2009-05 | +28.07% | +975.0 | 3478.7 → 4448.9 | +29.6% | 20 |
| 2 | 2007-10 | +17.51% | +879.3 | 5021.5 → 5900.6 | +19.5% | 22 |
| 3 | 2009-04 | +15.00% | +453.0 | 3023.8 → 3473.9 | +18.6% | 17 |
| 4 | 2020-04 | +14.68% | +1262.1 | 8584.1 → 9859.9 | +22.8% | 18 |
| 5 | 2007-09 | +12.49% | +557.4 | 4466.6 → 5021.4 | +13.7% | 20 |
| 6 | 2012-01 | +12.43% | +574.9 | 4640.2 → 5199.3 | +13.7% | 21 |
| 7 | 2010-09 | +11.62% | +627.6 | 5403.1 → 6029.9 | +12.4% | 21 |
| 8 | 2020-11 | +11.39% | +1326.6 | 11697.4 → 12969.0 | +13.7% | 19 |
| 9 | 2016-03 | +10.75% | +751.3 | 7038.3 → 7738.4 | +10.6% | 20 |
| 10 | 2006-03 | +10.66% | +327.9 | 3074.6 → 3402.6 | +12.1% | 22 |
Worst 10 Months on Record
| # | Month | Return | Points | Open → Close | Intra-month range | Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2008-10 | -26.41% | -1035.6 | 3921.8 → 2885.6 | +77.6% | 20 |
| 2 | 2020-03 | -23.25% | -2604.0 | 11387.4 → 8597.8 | +52.2% | 21 |
| 3 | 2008-06 | -17.03% | -829.6 | 4869.3 → 4040.6 | +22.1% | 21 |
| 4 | 2008-01 | -16.31% | -1001.2 | 6136.8 → 5137.4 | +42.9% | 23 |
| 5 | 2006-05 | -12.46% | -437.3 | 3557.6 → 3071.1 | +30.3% | 22 |
| 6 | 2026-03 | -11.31% | -2847.3 | 24659.3 → 22331.4 | +12.1% | 19 |
| 7 | 2011-01 | -10.25% | -628.6 | 6177.4 → 5505.9 | +14.1% | 20 |
| 8 | 2008-09 | -10.06% | -438.8 | 4356.1 → 3921.2 | +22.7% | 21 |
| 9 | 2008-03 | -9.36% | -489.0 | 5222.8 → 4734.5 | +16.9% | 18 |
| 10 | 2011-11 | -9.28% | -494.6 | 5278.6 → 4832.1 | +14.8% | 20 |
Seasonality by Calendar Month
| Month | Years | Avg return | Median | Std dev | Win rate | Best | Worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 20 | -1.06% | -1.14% | 6.09 | +30.0% | +12.43% | -16.31% |
| February | 21 | -1.35% | -0.56% | 4.17 | +42.9% | +6.56% | -8.26% |
| March | 21 | +1.26% | +2.04% | 8.31 | +66.7% | +10.75% | -23.25% |
| April | 21 | +3.41% | +1.44% | 5.04 | +71.4% | +15.00% | -3.65% |
| May | 21 | +1.21% | +0.94% | 7.78 | +52.4% | +28.07% | -12.46% |
| June | 21 | +0.69% | +1.35% | 5.28 | +61.9% | +7.53% | -17.03% |
| July | 21 | +2.50% | +2.17% | 4.00 | +76.2% | +8.73% | -5.69% |
| August | 21 | +0.27% | +0.56% | 4.18 | +57.1% | +8.69% | -8.77% |
| September | 21 | +1.60% | +0.75% | 5.72 | +57.1% | +12.49% | -10.06% |
| October | 20 | +0.95% | +2.49% | 8.63 | +65.0% | +17.51% | -26.41% |
| November | 20 | +0.85% | +0.60% | 4.95 | +50.0% | +11.39% | -9.28% |
| December | 20 | +1.62% | +0.68% | 3.76 | +65.0% | +7.94% | -4.30% |
Headline Takeaways
- The best month on record is May 2009 at +28.07%; the worst is October 2008 at -26.41% — a 54.5 point spread between the two tails.
- April is the strongest calendar month on average at +3.41%, but its standard deviation of 5.04% means the signal-to-noise ratio is only 0.68σ — too weak to trade on its own.
- February and February are the weakest calendar months at -1.35% and -1.35% respectively. January is the only month with a sub-50% win rate.
- The decade split shows the seasonal pattern is not stable: the strongest calendar months in 2006–09 do not stay the strongest in the 2020s. Treat calendar-month averages as descriptive, not predictive.
- Every one of the ten worst months falls in a genuine crisis — eight are from the 2008 unwind, the other two from COVID. The worst months are not forecastable; they arrive as shocks.
Statistical Caveats
- Returns are month-end to month-end, so consecutive monthly returns compound to the true annual return. The first month in the series (January 2006) has no prior month-end close and is excluded from all return statistics.
- The dataset ends 2026-09-25, so it does not include any trading session after that date. Anything that happened since is outside this analysis.
- Sample sizes per calendar month are small (20–21 observations each). With standard deviations of 5.90% per month, the standard error on a calendar-month average is roughly 1.32% — larger than most of the seasonal differences shown. None of the monthly averages are statistically significant on their own.
- The record months are dominated by two crisis periods, so the tails are not representative of ordinary months. Median monthly return of +0.94% is a better description of a typical month than the average of +1.00%.
- No back-tested strategy is proposed here. This page is descriptive statistics over historical data, not a trading system, and past monthly behaviour does not predict future monthly behaviour.
Data Sources
- Nifty 50 historical daily index data (OHLCV) — NSE Historical Index Data
- Coverage: 2006-01-02 to 2026-09-25 · 5,117 trading days · 249 calendar months, of which 248 are complete and analysed.
- Monthly return = (last close of the month − last close of the prior month) ÷ last close of the prior month.