The pain trade. A term coined by famed stockpicker and Jeff Macke favorite Jesse Livermore. The premise being the market will do whatever creates the most pain of the most people. In that vain, Q3 was giving investors a nice ride to the upside until September 19th when stocks began sliding backwards surprising many.

Sam Stovall, veteran strategist of S&P Capital IQ notes that not only was the S&P 500 (^GSPC) was up strongly for the quarter through September 19^th, it had posted May through September returns that were the reverse of mid-term election year averages since 1945.

In the past week, however, Stovall says investors have been given a bitter reminder of why the market can be so confounding, meaning “the year in which one gives up on a reliable seasonal indicator is the year in which it will start working again.”

“September is usually bad because it’s an end of quarter window-dressing, a lot of mutual funds end up having October fiscal year ends, so the thought is ‘let’s get rid of a lot of the dogs or maybe even let’s take some profits in some of the companies we really don’t think are gonna do much better going forward,’” he says.

The silver lining at least historically according to Stovall is things do pick up in October. And looking at the fourth quarter, S&P Capital IQ research finds that since 1990, the market was up 5% on average and rose in price 80% of the time. Stovall is taking the side of history this quarter, predicting the S&P 500 will hit 2050 by the end of the year.

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