In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 37: Sell in May and Go Away: Financial Astrology and Chapter 38: Chasing Spectacular Fund Performance.
LEARNING: Calendars don’t drive returns. Winners ignore hot funds.
“For you to believe in a strategy, there should be some economically logical reason for it to persist, so you can be confident it isn’t just some random outcome.”
Larry Swedroe
In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.
Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 37: Sell in May and Go Away: Financial Astrology and Chapter 38: Chasing Spectacular Fund Performance.
Chapter 37: Sell in May and Go Away: Financial Astrology
In chapter 37, Larry explains why the idea of selling stocks in May and switching to cash, then buying back in November, is not a sound strategy.
What financial advisers insist on repeating, in Larry’s view, is: “Sell in May, go to cash, and reinvest in November.” It makes sense and is even logical. And, as the adage has it, numbers don’t lie. Figures, backed by reliable data, show that stocks gain more from November through April (a 5.7% average premium) than from May through October (a 2.6% average premium). So why not time the market?
Busting the myth
Larry dismantles this advice, revealing that the ‘Sell in May’ strategy, despite its apparent logic, is a myth. He points out that stocks still outperform cash even during the May to October period, with stocks beating T-bills by 2.6% annually.
Selling stocks prematurely leads to missed gains, and the strategy of switching investments underperforms a simple buy-and-hold approach. In fact, a ‘Sell in May’ strategy yielded an average annual return of 8.3% from 1926 to 2023, while simply holding the S&P 500 returned 10.2%—a significant 1.9% yearly gap.
Larry adds that Taxes and fees make the strategy worse. Trading converts long-term gains (lower tax) into short-term gains (higher tax). Transaction costs always pile up.
Additionally, this strategy is rarely effective. Before 2022, the last “win” was 2011. A single outlier (2022’s bear market) does not make a strategy worthwhile.
The fatal flaw
According to Larry, one of the fundamental rules of finance is that expected return and risk are positively correlated. So if stocks actually do worse than cash between May and October, they’d need to be less risky for these six months, which is absurd because volatility doesn’t take summer vacations.
Why do people believe in this flawed strategy?
Larry notes four reasons why people still believe in this flawed investment strategy:
- Recency bias: Media hypes the strategy after rare wins (like 2022).
- Pattern-seeking: Humans confuse coincidence with...
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