Yikes! It’s September.

By Dian Vujovich

Two things to absolutely positively know about September? First and foremost, it’s my birth month. Go ahead, send me happy wishes. And second, historically market performance hasn’t been so hot in what many consider to be South Florida’s hottest month of the year, temp wise.

But before talking September,we can’t ignore August.

The month of August is typically a kind of ho-hum market month. Investors and Wall Streeters tend to focus on vacationing or getting their kids ready for schools rather than trading. Trading volume is also typically light and the S&P 500s performance considered mediocre based on reviewing all August’s as far back at World War 11. This, according to Sam Stovall, a U.S. equity strategist at S&P Capital IQ. He also said is usually a very volatile month.

He sure got that last point right.

But now it’s September. What’s Stovall got to say about it?

Well, nothing to crow about if you only look at the numbers and forget about market opportunities—and there are always market opportunities.

According to Stovall, going back 70 years, to 1945, if the S&P 500 fell more than 5 percent in August, 80 percent of the time it would decline in September.

The guys over at Bespoke also point out that September can have a testy nature. Over the last 20 years, they said its performance has been the fourth worst of the calendar year.

I’m going to put those longer-term historic figures aside and only look at market performance so far this year. Here are Bloomberg’s numbers as of the close of business on September 1, 2015: The DJIA down 8.33 percent year-to-date (YTD); the S&P 500 down 5.73 YTD; and NASDAQ, down 1.25 percent YTD.

When you look at the numbers and focus on where we stand YTD, somehow things don’t look quite so horrible do they.