It's May, so it must be time to sell some shares. There is an old stock market adage that you should sell in May and not go back into equities until St Ledger's Day, which this year falls on September 10.
And it's true that the market tends to perform worse in the summer than in the autumn and winter. If you had invested £1,000 in shares in 1970, but only in the six months between May 1 and October 31, you would have been left with just £443 by 2003. The same £1,000 invested between November 1 and April 30 would have grown into £28,189.
