"Sell in May and go away" is a well-known saying in finance based on stocks' supposedly underperforming during the six months from May 1 to October 31. The Stock Trader's Almanac popularized the idea of the historical pattern, which found that investing in stocks as represented by the Dow Jones Industrial Average from November to April (we'll discuss this as the "winter" period) and switching to fixed-income investments the other six months (the "summer") would have "produced reliable returns with reduced risk since 1950."