2002 August 23, “Jumping but jumpy”, in The Economist, retrieved 11 October 2015:
If ever there was a year in which, as the saying goes, “to sell in May and go away”, this was surely it. . . . From the beginning of May, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood above 10,000, it slid to a low in July of 7,702.
"Sell in May, and go away" is an old English proverb, but it does have some basis in reality. In the 1980s, Yale Hirsch, founder of the Stock Trader's Almanac, crunched the numbers. . . . From 1950 to 2007, the market from May to October provided an average annual gain of 0.6%, enough to earn $1,021 on $10,000 in those years. But if you had invested only in the "best six months," from November to April, your average gain would have been 7.6%, netting you $531,444 over those 58 years.
One such truism is this: “Sell in May and go away”, meaning investors are best advised to sell stocks at the beginning of May and return to the equity market at the end of October.
