Investing - buy when it snows and sell when it goes

(left-click to enlarge pic) 

10/23/10 - Here is a very unusual way of timing your stock market investments!

Have you tried it?

To recap the article (for those worker-bees), do seasonal investing ... buy S&P/TSX index (such as ETFs) in October and sell in May.

In their analysis, $10,000 in S&P/TSX index from 1977 (buying in October and selling in late May) to 2010 would havew produced $176,000.

Not knowing what the markets would have produced over that time, this still looks like an excellent ROI.

Canada banks also have this type of trending for Oct-Dec.

There is a seasonal ETF - Horizons AlphaPro Seasonal Rotation ETF - for those of you who don't have time to check other areas. It launched last November and has returned 11% as of last week (compared to 8% for the S&P/TSX index).

Caveats:

1. use small amounts of money to do several seasonal trades   

2. diversify