Calendar no cure all. (Investments & Finance).

IT's been a long winter in the U.S. stock market. Longer, and chillier, than usual. Just ask investors who track seasonal patterns in market history. Their point of reference is the "best six months" strategy popularized in the Hirsch Organization's annual Stock Trader's Almanac, which says that the period from fate fall to early spring is the prime part of the year to be in the market.

The system advocates owning stocks from Nov. 1 through April 30 each time around the calendar. For the rest of the year, May 1 through Oct. 31, it calls for switching into bonds.

If you followed this approach from 1950 through 2001, figures almanac publisher Jeff Hirsch, you could have turned $10,000 into $457,103 holding the stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average each Nov. 1 through April 30.

You avoided a net loss of $77 on your $10,000 by not owning those same stocks each May 1 through Oct. 31. "Random walkers, eat your hearts out," Hirsch says in the almanac's 2003 edition.

Well, random walkers--believers in the essential unpredictability of the markets--may see no reason to do that right now. Stock averages have dropped in each of the last three months.

There's still room for a rebound to spiff up the numbers by April 30. Rallies last week made a start in that direction. Even if the improvement continues, though, calendar-conscious traders would barely have time to enjoy it before they have to deal with the May-to-October problem.

None of this is to suggest that you or I invest serious money by blindly following a calendar indicator. "History helps you understand the past so you're prepared for what can happen in relatively parallel situations," says Hirsch.

The current situation seems out of parallel with anything in recent experience. The six-month timing system isn't the only celebrated pattern that has failed to hold.

Remember the January effect, which documents the tendency of small stocks to outshine big stocks in the first month of the year? In January 2003 the small-stock Russell 2000 Index dropped 2.8 percent, exceeding the big-stock Russell 1000 Index's 2.4 percent decline.

Actually, there may be some parallels to be found between the present and a couple of bearish seasons in the past. The worst Nov. 1-to-April 30 periods that show up in Hirsch's data were in 196970, when the Dow fell 14 percent.

Both occurred in the shadow of "geopolitical" problems, though that 21 st century buzzword wasn't so commonly used in those days. You had the Vietnam War in the first case, Middle East conflict and an energy crisis in the second.

Aberrance, it appears, usally comes with an explanation. Today's trouble list starts with Iraq, circles the globe to North Korea--and comes back to the United States, where the nation is said by some to be facing its most serious threat of deflation since the 1930s.

If the present time is so out of joint, then an upbeat thought suggests itself. When the best six months turn out uncharacteristically weak, couldn't the subsequent "worst six months" also depart from form and turn in better showing than usual?

Sorry, but the historical record isn't encouraging. Looking at Hirsch's tables, we see that the clunker between November 1969 and April 1970 was followed by a skimpy 2.7 percent gain from May 1970 through October 1971.