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The September stock market scaries reared their head on day 1 — will the pattern hold?

When Green Day sang “Wake Me Up When September Ends” back in 2004, they were obviously talking about the stock market anomaly that’s bugged researchers and investors for years: that the ninth month on our calendars has statistically been the stock market’s weakest, across decades and even borders.

With day 1 of September 2025 now in the books, the month might already be living up to its reputation, as the S&P 500 slipped 0.7% on Tuesday, dragged lower by high-flying AI names hitting the brakes.

Indeed, over the past 45 years, September has been the only month when the S&P 500 Index has averaged a loss. While it’s one thing to know September is weak on average, it’s another to see how often the month really goes south.

In the last decade alone, six Septembers have ended in the red, with four of the past five being especially rough. That includes a 9.3% plunge in 2022 — deeper than the drop seen in 2008 — when the Fed’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign, made in a bid to quell surging post-pandemic inflation, rattled investors.

Why September tends to be weak is maddening — intuitively, it shouldn’t matter what month it is, but the phenomenon has been found to date back to the 1930s. Various theories have been posited, starting with the seasonal moves that can add to selling pressure. Fund managers, for instance, often clean up their portfolios before fiscal year-end in September and October, while some investors start early on selling losers to shrink their tax bill. 

One academic study pointed to “post-holiday blues” — when trading slows during summer breaks, bad news isn’t fully priced in, and markets adjust lower once investors return in September. Others have suggested that fewer hours of daylight could affect our moods, or that IPO seasonality could play a role, with bankers bringing more stocks to market after the summer lull to test investor appetite for equities. Pop psychology could add another layer: if many brace for a drop, it could be enough to spark a real drop on any hint of bad news.

And it’s not just on Wall Street. Researchers found similar patterns across 47 countries, with average stock returns ~1% lower in the month following major school holidays. In fact, per RBC’s analysis, markets in Canada, the UK, and Hong Kong have all stumbled in September over the past five decades. 

Of course, seasonal influences are only ever going to be very marginal at most. So, if the economy roars, inflation cools, AI makes a breakthrough, and geopolitical tensions abate, expect stocks to soar no matter what the calendar says.

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The Powerball jackpot has risen to $1.4 billion ahead of Wednesday’s draw

Though scooping the $1.1 billion prize pot would have been a fairy-tale way for someone to round out the long weekend, the absence of a lucky Powerball winner on Monday means that the jackpot has ballooned to an estimated $1.4 billion ahead of Wednesday night’s draw.

The $1.4 billion sum — a calculation based on the winner taking 30 payouts over almost three decades, rather than a smaller lump-sum payment — is staggering, but a multitude of factors have actually made billion-dollar prizes a lot more common in recent years. Indeed, a winner on Wednesday night would take home the third-biggest Powerball jackpot of the 2020s, and only the fourth-largest overall.

Since January 2021, an impressive five Powerball games have now reached or exceeded the $1 billion mark, with one lucky winner in California picking up a $2.04 billion prize in the largest US lottery win of all time.

However, the trend of bigger pots in Powerball and Mega Millions competitions has been growing for the last decade or so, as ticket prices have doubled, rising interest rates have affected annuities, odds have shifted, and both major multistate draws ditched rules that restricted where they could sell their tickets.

Still, with the allure of billionaire-level wealth, it’s little surprise that the lottery still has so many of us in a vice grip, some 60 years on from when the modern version of the game landed in the US. In 2023, 50% of the population reported playing at least once annually, with Americans spending over $113 billion on lotteries that same year — reportedly more than they spent on books, movies, concerts, and sports tickets combined.

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