The first of May is upon us, and every financial journal seems to have some article about the merits of a seasonal strategy for getting in and out of the market. While there is something to be said for it’s performance long term, we’ve previously taken a look at the performance of seasonal trading with our portfolios, and adjusted it somewhat.

As you may have seen, we published an article some time back where we cover the fact that the majority of the underperformance of the markets in the May through October time frame is actually due to the 3rd quarter, specifically August and September. You can read more about this at our Market Timing with Mutual Funds article.

Using this analysis as background, we trade it in our Fidelity Seasonal Trading System. This system is tracked real time just as the rest of our systems.