What MarketWatch.com traffic data says about the market

Jeremy Olshan, the editor in chief of MarketWatch.com, writes about how data about its readers reflects what is going on in the stock market.

Olshan writes, ” January, for instance, was the market’s worst start to a year in nearly a decade. It also happened to be MarketWatch’s best month ever for traffic. Some 23.5 million unique visitors came to the site, many muttering a whole bunch of four-letter words, and one three-letter word: oil.

“Traffic to our various oil futures ticker pages jumped more than 30% in January. In fact, oil overtook Apple in the rankings of top tickers. This had never happened in the time I’ve been with the site.

“Yes, there was a lot of interest in China in January, but our readers spoke with their clicks: Oil was the story. Traffic to the Apple quote page, meanwhile, has been down 15% — this despite the best efforts of our good friends at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“But the No. 1 ticker of 2016 has far and away been that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.26% , which saw a 113% increase in January. This, to me, was a clear measure of the degree of uncertainty in 2016. MarketWatch columnist Chuck Jaffe had written a piece on why investors should stop paying attention to the Dow. We resurfaced it in January. But that did zero to curb the frantic volume of “DJIA” quote searches.”

Read more here.