Does the PSE have a best month?

Over the last five years some calendar months have averaged better than others, and this page shows which. But five years gives only four or five observations per month, which is far too few to call a pattern reliable. Treat the figures as a description of what happened, not a rule about what happens next.

For each stock, the closing price on the last trading day of each month is compared with the last trading day of the month before. Those monthly changes are then grouped by calendar month and averaged geometrically, which is the correct way to average growth rates. A stock that did not trade in the preceding month is left out of that month rather than having a multi-month gap counted as one move.

The index line here is an equal-weighted basket of the 30 largest listed companies, not the PSEi itself, which is weighted by company size. Equal weighting means a large company and a smaller one in the basket count the same, so the two can move differently in a given month, sometimes in opposite directions. PSEye does not have licensed PSEi history, so it builds an honest proxy and labels it as one.

It is breadth. The index can rise in a month while most individual stocks fall, because a few large companies carry it. The share of stocks that rose describes the month a typical holder actually experienced, which is often worse than the index suggests.

This page will not tell you to. A pattern drawn from four or five observations per month is weak evidence, trading costs apply to every attempt to exploit one, and the sector and stock figures are thinner still. The honest use of this page is context, not a signal. See what a trade actually costs

PSEye keeps a separate year-by-year table built from the same daily closes, with the compound annual return since 2020, the best and worst years, and how far the market currently sits below its high over that period. It is built on the same equal-weighted 30-stock basket used here, so the two pages are measuring the same thing at different resolutions. See returns by year

Five years of daily closing prices from PSE EDGE, which is as far back as PSEye's own price history reaches. Companies listed more recently contribute only the months they were trading for, and the stock table leaves out anything without a full five-year record so that one stock's best-of-five is not compared with another's best-of-two.