Should you 'Sell in May and go away'?

One popular investment strategy is to dump stocks just before big institutional investors take profits, and sell up ahead of their summer break. Sounds like an easy route to riches. But can investing be all that simple? Tim Bennett investigates.

One of the biggest investment clichs, "sell in May and go away don't come back until St Leger Day", always does the rounds at this time of year. The theory is that you dump stocks just before big institutional investors take profits and sell up ahead of their summer break. You get back in just before the St Leger horserace in September, when prices rise as the big players return to invest. Sounds like an easy route to riches. But can investing be all that simple?

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Tim graduated with a history degree from Cambridge University in 1989 and, after a year of travelling, joined the financial services firm Ernst and Young in 1990, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1994.

He then moved into financial markets training, designing and running a variety of courses at graduate level and beyond for a range of organisations including the Securities and Investment Institute and UBS. He joined MoneyWeek in 2007.