Bad month for stock and shares?

bowlhead99

coastline wrote: »

sell April 30th buy back Nov 1st..

http://www.masterinvestormagazine.co.uk/latest/should-you-still-sell-in-may/

http://intel.harriman-house.com/trading/halloween-indicator-timing-market-significantly-beats-time-market/

The "Sell in May and come back on St Leger's Day" adage has been around for years, though as they don't have a St Leger's Day in the US they tend to just split the year into two 6-monthly chunks for running their stats.

If you had sold Lloyds on April 30th this year at 78p you would have missed the effect of the first quarter results announced the very next day which helped drive them to 88p today. Who knows where it will be by September or November but it's up 13% since the proposed "everybody out!" date.

Personally I haven't played the "seasonality" game other than by coincidence or circumstance. It is fun to look at the stats, but doesn't work a lot of years, and I would feel stupid moving a whole pension or ISA portfolio into cash for half the year just to gamble that cash would give a better return than investing in a profitable business.

You can prove whatever you like with cherry picked statistics. I could split the year arbitrarily from Valentine's Day to 15 August and run the numbers for 50 years on major markets and then say "on average, proved by half a century of data, you'd be better to be in the market this half of the year than the other". In fact, the return of a portfolio over time can be proven to be hugely influenced by whether you caught the top ten or bottom ten days or weeks in an entire decade. Your only problem is, you don't know when the next terrible crash or outrageous rally is going to happen...

tigerspill

Mine is down as well, but is recovering in the past few days.
Not really important as I wont need the cash for nearly 10 years.