Shall I compare thee, O stock market, to a summer’s day?
Summer is here.
Well, it is somewhere.
Where I live it’s been foggy. Yuck.
The heater has even been on. Yuck squared.
While I may be complaining about the cold there is some seasonality and data reasons supporting a sunny second half of the year for stocks.
Even though summer is not the best season for the DOW, July tends to be the best month of the summer. The above chart from Chart of the Day illustrates that.1
Furthermore, Eddy Elfenbein, points out that:
Historically, this has been one of the better times of year for the stock market. From June 29 to Sept 6, the Dow has gained an average of 3.66%
That’s nearly half the annual gain in a little over two months.2
Some more (S’mores anyone?) encouragement comes from Ryan Detrick of Carson Group. He notes the following:
A good start to a year usually means a good second half. Sure, it isn’t always that simple, and 1987 is in here, but looking at the 22 times the S&P 500 was up at least 10 percent as of the end of June, the next six months added an average of 7.7 percent, a median of 10.0%, and were higher close to 82 percent of the time six months later. That eight percent needed now for new highs puts that right in line to potentially happen. Lastly, the final six months have been higher the past 11 times the S&P 500 was up at least 10% as of the end of June.3
I prefer past historical investment data like this to future unknown investment outlooks that banks have begun releasing lately, but it’s not something worth throwing the kitchen sink at. Past performance is no guarantee of future investment results—no matter how badly you want it to be.
The investor must always be careful with any kind of thing that smells like a stock market “outlook”. The gifted financial writer, Jason Zweig, mocked this term by defining it this way:
OUTLOOK, n. A session at the Ouija board by financial pundits; like all Wall Street FORECASTs, an outlook is an aftercast, based not on what is likely to happen but rather on what has been happening.4
Though we can’t be certain or control what will happen on the back half of ’23, we do know that if you focus on what you can control—like your long-term financial plan and staying within your risk tolerance—you can enjoy your summer with the ones you love regardless of how “hot” or “cold” your investment portfolio is.
And after last year’s ugliness, we will certainly take the sunnier stock market we’ve been experiencing so far!
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Sources:
- Accessed online: https://www.chartoftheday.com/dow-jones-average-monthly-gain
- Tweeted June 26, 2023. Accessed online: https://twitter.com/EddyElfenbein/status/1673372321594351617
- “Why Stocks Could Make a New High in 2023”. Accessed online: https://www.carsongroup.com/insights/blog/why-stocks-could-make-a-new-high-in-2023/
- The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, p. 150.