September Is The Worst Month For Stocks


If your investments don’t do as well this month as they have in previous months, don’t worry. It’s just September, and September is historically the worst month for stocks.

As Mark Hulbert of the Hulbert Financial Digest explains, at MarketWatch:

Not only is its average return the worst of any since the Dow Jones Industrial Average was created in the late 1800s (minus 1.0%, versus an average gain of 0.8% for all other months), its poor performance has been quite consistent. In all decades but one over the last century, September’s performance rank was in the bottom half of the distribution.

This September might be particularly volatile, thanks to economic anxieties about tariffs and interest rates and yield curves, but that doesn’t mean you should start panicking. In fact, Hulbert advises stockholders to… well, continue holding:

Here’s my strategy for exploiting September’s record as the worst month of the calendar for the stock market: Make no changes to your portfolio.

However, if you want to add “buy” to the standard “buy and hold” advice, remember that any temporary market downswing also means that stocks are on sale.

And if you’re following our suggestion to check your investment portfolio only once a month, you might want to hold off this month’s check until, like, September 30.

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