by Gary Alexander
March 31, 2026
“Now is the Winter of our Discontent ….” – Shakespeare, “Richard III” (opening), 1597
“If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?” – Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind” (last line), 1820
“We loiter in Winter when it is already Spring” – Thoreau, in “Walden,” 1854
Spring began on Friday, March 20. Sure, the weather is warming, and some flowers are already blooming outside my window, but the S&P 500 suffered its worst week of 2026 last week, the first-week of spring.
Shakespeare, Shelley and Thoreau had the right perspective on seasonal shifts. Maybe it was those long northern winters, but winter doesn’t last forever, and the fears that can accompany those cold, short-days inevitably melt with the spring thaws. If you don’t believe me, look at the market last year at this time.
In the last full week of March 2025 (March 24-28), the S&P 500 was down over 6% for the month and down 10% since Trump’s Inauguration week. In March, the President announced Liberation Day coming the next week, so I thought the timing was good to buy stocks in the Consumer Discretionary sector, as we seldom go wrong underestimating the consumer’s love of shopping. Economist Ed Yardeni compares shopping to a dopamine high. It’s like happy hour: Some drink to celebrate, others to drown their sorrows.
I won’t name the stocks I bought a year ago, since I don’t offer any specific stock picks here, but I picked three-ripe fruit off the tree of Louis Navellier’s published portfolios, as filtered through his Stock Grader.
Alas, all three fell sharply over the next 10-days, falling 15% to 25% just after I bought them, causing me to mutter some unflattering oaths at the TV screen during President Trump’s and Howard Lutnick’s list of punitive tariffs on what they boldly called “Liberation Day.” A year later, however, all three stocks are up, with the latter two doubling from last April’s lows to recent highs. I had bad timing, but in good stocks.
- I bought stock #1 at $217 and it fell to $164 a week later, but it doubled to $366 in August 2025.
- I bought stock #2 at $196 and it fell to $166 a week later, but it rose to $237 on October 3, 2025.
- I bought stock #3 at $110 and it fell to $87 a week later before rising to $168 in February 2026.
Buy-and-hold investors don’t have to worry much about entry and exit points. Just buy quality stocks.
April is the Best Month in the Last 50 Years – But It’s Not So Hot Lately
The good news is April is historically one of the best market months. Prior to 2024, according to the Bespoke Investment Group table below, April was #3 (behind July and barely behind December) for the 100-years since 1925. More importantly, April was #1 for the 50-years from 1975 to 2024 (data-below):
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
The bad news is more relevant: April hasn’t done much for us lately. Due to the President’s rude April 2nd opening round of last year’s tariff wars, the S&P 500 fell nearly 14% (April 2-8, 2025), before scrambling back to close April 2025 down less than 1% (off just -0.76%) before soaring for the remainder of the year.
At one point recently, the S&P 500 was up nearly 45% (intra-day) in a robust 10-month recovery surge.
The downside of April was also evident in other recent years: 2024 saw the S&P 500 down 4.2%, and April 2022 was down 9%, so we’ve seen some April showers in the last five-years, in 2022 to 2025.
Some Great Songs Clarify the Split Personality of April Stock Markets
My hobby is music history, so I celebrate spring by programming songs with “spring” or April in the title. In my weekly radio show, I bring forth songs of the season each Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, and I can confirm Spring has more songs about it than the other three seasons, as Spring represents a new birth in nature – flowers blooming, snow melting, and longer days with more sunshine – that sort of thing.
But the message of these songs can be two-faced. About half of all Spring and April songs seem to regret the amplified loneliness of April or Spring for those living without love in their lives. Some titles include:
- “April Showers,” with words by Buddy De Sylva, written for Al Jolson in 1921.
- “April Snow,” with words by Dorothy Fields for “Up in Central Park” in 1945.
- “Lost April,” the last song with words by Eddie De Lange – written for Nat “King” Cole in 1948.
- “April Fooled Me,” another clever lyric by Dorothy Fields, from 1956, and
- “April, Come She Will,” by Paul Simon, for Simon and Garfunkel in 1965.
When “April Showers” came out in 1921, America was coming out of a global pandemic, a World War, a Red Scare, a Wall Street crash, and a deep recession, but songwriters had fun anyway, with hit songs in 1921 like: “Look for the Silver Lining,” “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and this Al Jolson classic, later turned into a film (in 1948):
When April showers may come your way
They bring the flowers that bloom in May
So when it’s raining, have no regrets
It isn’t raining rain, you know, it’s raining violets
And when you see clouds up on the hills,
You know they’ll bring crowds of daffodils,
So just keep on looking for a bluebird
And listening for his song
Whenever April showers come along
The clear message is that rain brings out a more bountiful April, later on, either late in April or by early May.
That brings us to some of the down-beat songs with “Spring” in the title, like:
- “Spring is Here” (I Hear), by Rodgers and Hart (1938)
- “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” by Frank Loesser (1944)
- “Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most, by a pair of hipsters* (1955)
- You Must Believe in Spring, by Michael LeGrand, Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
*Fran Landesman wrote the words and Tommy Wolf the music. They met in a St. Louis bar in the mid-1950s and wanted to cast T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land” (which begins “April is the Cruelest month”) in beat language.
With the markets we’ve seen lately, perhaps the words of Alan and Marilyn Bergman resonate the best:
When lonely feelings chill the meadows of your mind
Just think, if winter comes can Spring be far behind.
Behind the deepest snows, the secret of a rose
Is merely that it knows: You must believe in Spring.
It’s hard to see now, but flowers and birds (and some great songs) announce the earth’s rebirth each year.
The Masters golf tourney comes next week, then comes the French tennis open in May. Both sports rely on warmer weather, so maybe the gorgeous flowers of Augusta, Georgia, can defrost these icy markets.