Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of September 7, 2016

Article Excerpt

If you’ve been investing for a number of years, you’ve probably heard of the “summer market doldrums”. Some investors take this to refer to the sluggish periods that the market goes through every summer. That same sluggishness appears in other businesses. In both cases, it has something to do with the timing of customer vacations. Other investors think of the summer doldrums as the source of the market’s seasonally weak performance between May and October. Since 1926, stock market returns from May through October have been around half of what they were in the rest of the year. This 90-year period includes the 1929/1932 market collapse that occurred at the start of the 1930s Depression. It’s the source of the old-time market saying, “Sell in May and go away.” Early in your investing career, you may go through a period of intense interest in this and other seasonal market tendencies,…