“Sell in May and go away,” is an old Wall Street adage. I first heard about it from my father, a New York businessman, on a hot afternoon back in the last century.

“The brokers and the people with real money are in the Hamptons now,” he shouted over the bedlam of city traffic as he drove us home in an un-air-conditioned Ford sedan. “They just shut down for the summer and relax. The rest of us, who are still working, might as well forget about the market, too, because nothing’s happening.” In an election year, he said, that was doubly true. Nobody but the pros paid close attention to politics until Labor Day.

That was the theory, anyway. Ignoring both politics and the markets is clearly not feasible this summer. If you blinked, you missed riveting political news. And partly because of politics, specific sectors and fixed-income instruments have been fluctuating. But as far as investing goes, quick trades are hazardous, and I think most people would be better off at the beach.

“The Trump trade” is what financial strategies associated with the shifting fortunes of the former president are being called. Such market bets have been connected by Wall Street analysts to movements in the prices of gun, prison and fossil-fuel energy stocks. And the Trump trade has also been attributed to small moves in bond yields and in expectations of changes in transactions, from mergers and acquisitions to the exchange rate of the dollar.

If the vice president’s polling is strong, I’m sure there will soon be a Harris trade, too, with bets on clean energy stocks, health care companies and the like.

But I’d keep away from all these trades if your goal is accumulating money for critical goals like retirement or education or health care or a car or a house. Staying invested for the long haul, preferably in low-cost index funds that hold the entire stock and bond markets, is the approach I favor.