September Is the Worst Month for Stocks
If your investment isn’t doing as well this month as it did in previous months, don’t worry. It’s just September, and September has historically been the worst month for stocks.
As Mark Halbert of Hulbert Financial Digest explains on MarketWatch :
Not only is its average return the worst of all since the Dow Jones Industrial Average was created in the late 1800s (minus 1.0% versus 0.8% average gain over all other months). its low performance has been fairly stable. For all but one decade of the past century, September’s productivity rankings have been in the bottom half of the distribution.
This September may be particularly volatile due to economic concerns over tariffs, interest rates and yield curves, but that doesn’t mean you should start panicking. In fact, Halbert advises shareholders … well, keep holding:
Here’s my strategy for using September’s record as the worst month in the calendar for the stock market: Don’t change your portfolio.
However, if you want to add “buy” to the standard “buy and hold” advice, remember that any temporary drop in the market also means that the stock is up for sale.
And if you follow our suggestion to check your investment portfolio only once a month , you can postpone the check of this month, for example, until September 30th.