The odds that the stock market will be higher at the end of the year are about two-in-three.The stock market, sitting as it is on a year-to-date gain of nearly 9%, stands a two-out-of-three chance of being even higher at year’s end. Not bad, you no doubt will agree. But what you probably don’t realize is that those odds have nothing to do with how strong the market has been so far this year. The odds of a positive second half of the year would be the same even if the market were today posting a year-to-date loss of 9% as opposed to a gain. This concept is hard for many of us to accept. Doesn’t the market exhibit trends? In retrospect, of course, it certainly appears as though there are distinct trends. But much of what we think are trends are in fact nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of what is otherwise a lot of randomness. The proof of this is in the eating. Consider the percentage of time the Dow Jones Industrial DJIA, -0.46% rises in the second half of the year. Since its creation in 1896, it has done so 66.7% of the time, on average — or two out of every three years. In just those years in which the Dow rose in the first half, this percentage is only slightly higher, at 71.6%. (See accompanying chart.)via