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This month has been a good one for financial markets. All three major indices had their best month since October of 2011.
Since 1992, there have been just four months in which the Dow Jones industrial average has seen monthly gains bigger than this month. And three of those four months were in October.
See more key market stats here:
- The Dow also had its biggest monthly point gain ever, up 1,379 points in October
- The has only had 12 monthly gains greater than 8% back to 1987
- Microsoft is up 18.93% for the month; its best since April
- Amazon is up 22.27% for the month, its best month since July
- The German DAX turned in its best month since April 2009, with a gain of 12.32% this month
- The UK FTSE 100 turned in its best month since July 2013, with a gain of 4.94% this October
- Japan's Nikkei turned in its best month since April 2013; it gained 9.75%
- China's Shanghai Comp turned in its best month since April 2015; it gained 10.8%
- Shanghai broke a 4-month losing streak, closing positive for the month for the first time in 5 months
- Baidu is up 36.4% in October, for its 4th best month ever (back to its 2005 IPO)
- WTI Crude is up 3.4% for October, but hit July highs of $50.92 per barrel earlier in the month
- Natural gas suffered their worst month since December 2014 when futures lost 29.16%; they were down 7.9% in October
- Natural gas futures have turned in 4 consecutive months of losses for the first time since September 2011
— CNBC's Christopher Hayes, Gina Francolla and Robert Hum contributed to this report.