Simon English: Doomsters wrong over crash that never was

Outlook Talking of the stock market, what happened to that crash the folk who look for doom in every corner were so enjoying?

That old City cliche so hoary it is physically painful to write – sell in May, come back on St Leger day – was trotted out with tedious regularity by seen-it-all-before bores roughly once every 15 seconds at the start of the summer.

Academic "proof" that the stock market will collapse in the summer was traced back to 1694 by one commentator, who probably remembers each miserable year since then.

For a while the misery-guts crowd even looked like being right. The FTSE 100 was around 5,800 at the start of May and soon plunged to 5,300 by June. Market in crisis! Billions wiped off!

Since then it has been on an impressive bull run, and closed last night at a bit below 5,800 despite a bad day at the office that saw it lose 80-odd points.

So if you'd ignored the traditional advice and sat tight, you'd at worst have lost nothing, saved a few quid on dealing fees and might even be up a bit overall.