The Month of May is Here to Stay
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2024
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/4bjQ9x6
“Sell in May and go away” became an adage some people love to say in our business, and I really have no idea where it came from. Whenever people ask me if we follow that adage I reply the same as I do about any other “adage” – things that are made up to offer a cute rhyme may not necessarily be the best way to formulate an investment policy.
Some months markets go down. Some months really good investment plans see the holdings in a portfolio increase in price, and other times decrease in price, The investment plan is not better or worse in some months than the others – it is all part of the plan presumably put together.
Various calendar correlations, almanac tidbits, and nursery rhyme poetry are not investment strategies. They are actually not even good at understanding correlations, let alone causations, as most of these things on their own merits and claims are merely 50/50 propositions.
But what is a real investable philosophy is what you can find in the pages of Dividend Cafe. And for a discussion of all those things and more, we start … now …
Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:12.2 | Well, hello and welcome to the Dividing Cafe back here in the New York office. |
| 0:17.9 | It's been a couple weeks since I've been back here. |
| 0:23.2 | And actually sitting in my office right now because we had a few little tech issues with the studio. But nevertheless, the message is |
| 0:28.8 | here for delivery. I start off this week. I want to talk about this expression that some of you may |
| 0:34.6 | have heard sell in May and go away. And I could probably do a couple |
| 0:41.8 | little pieces of Google search to find out different theories as to where exactly the thing |
| 0:47.9 | came from. All I know is over the last 15 years, you know, there's been a few years where May was |
| 0:53.6 | down, a bunch of years where May was down, a bunch of years where |
| 0:55.1 | May was up, a bunch years where May was flat. |
| 0:57.6 | And that's where all of these stupid, trivial, juvenile, idiotic little sayings and euphemisms come |
| 1:07.7 | from is not a particular statistical or archival foundation, but rather just kind of |
| 1:16.6 | because they rhyme, they become some form of investment policy for certain people. |
| 1:22.4 | And you'll hear it every now and then. |
| 1:23.9 | And often it will be used to say, you know, the tougher times of the market will be |
| 1:28.9 | from May through September, so sell away a bit and come back into the fall. And then some |
| 1:33.2 | say come back in October, some say come back in November. You know, when I say some, I'm referring |
| 1:38.1 | to what we call in the, you want a real intellectual term, what we refer to as idiots. |
| 1:45.0 | That's the types of people I'm talking about here. |
| 1:47.8 | You know, the notion that portfolio construction properly constructed investment plan |
| 1:53.5 | is to be disrupted around verbs that rhyme with months in the calendar. |
| 1:59.3 | I don't think is super cogent. But what I will say is this. |
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