Analyst Says the Worst Month for Stocks Since 1950 Is Setting Up Wrong This Year
September has buried more portfolios than any other month since 1950, but one strategist says the traders treating this year like every other year are making a costly assumption about what actually drives those losses. Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group, argued on CNBC that the calendar looks worse than the market does. September carries a reputation as the ugliest month for the S&P 500 going back three-quarters of a century, but Detrick’s point was that the reputation was earned mostly in years when the market limped into September. This year the market is not limping. That distinction matters because seasonality is often used as a reason to trim exposure without much thought given to the conditions underlying the statistic. A month is a container, shaped by whatever conditions the market carries into it. What tends to matter is what the market was already doing when it walked in the door. The intro data supports Detrick’s framing. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY) is up 5.47% over the trailing month and 12.82% year to date. Volatility is quiet, with the VIX at 14.51 on August 27, 2026, well inside the low-volatility zone. That is a very different starting point than the weak Augusts that preceded the historically bad Septembers. Detrick called out the seasonality directly on air. “September is the worst month on average, the worst since 1950, the worst the last ten years. Usually the bad Septembers historically are when you have a weak market coming into it. That’s not the case right now.” His breadth argument was the follow-up. “We’re looking at one of the best Augusts we’ve had in a while. We have almost 70% of the stocks in the S&P 500 above their 200-day moving average. There really is a lot of participation.” Detrick was pointing at how many stocks are above their 200-day moving average, a rolling average of the last 200 daily closes for each stock. A stock trading above that line is generally in a longer-term uptrend. When the share of index members above that line runs near 70%, the advance is broad rather than carried by a handful of megacaps. Breadth like that historically shows up before strong months, not weak ones. Matt Powers, managing partner, framed the fundamentals on the same broadcast. “Earnings are rock solid. You’re looking at the strongest earnings growth we’ve had since the third quarter of 2021. Ten of 11 sectors grew earnings and almost all at double digits.” That reading matters because September selloffs in prior cycles often coincided with earnings revisions turning lower. Broad sector participation in profit growth is the opposite signal. Consumer sentiment supports the demand side, though only partially. The University of Michigan index rebounded to 55.2 in July 2026, up sharply from June but still below the level the source describes as neutral. The trend has improved, though the absolute reading remains subdued. Bilal Little, global ETF strategist, flagged the technical undercurrent. “Markets are waiting on Warsh. The second point that I’ll point out is volume is actually really low right now.”