For fans of seasonal trading patterns, April has been a real bummer. It’s not just that it has been a down month (down 3.0% for the S&P 500, breaking a 5-month win streak).
It’s that April is supposed to be a strong month. It is traditionally the best month of the year for the Dow Industrials (average gain 1.9% since 1950, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac), and the second best month for the S&P 500 (up 1.5%, second only to November’s 1.7% gain).
Goodbye to all that.
Of greater concern is that we are about to enter a seasonally weak six-month period, and on the surface the old “Sell in May and go away” adage seems to be justified: the average yearly gain for the Dow Industrials since 1950 has been 0.8% from the beginning of May to the end of October, but 7.3% measured from November through April.
So does this mean that simply selling now would produce superior returns to staying in the market? It does not.
Nicholas Colas from DataTrek recently took a look at the best six months strategy from a shorter time period (1980 to 2024). He also broke the data into smaller pieces. Here are the results for the S&P 500:
