By Terry Connelly

It’s baseball season, so superstition is back in fashion in the stock market – not least, the old chestnut, “sell in May and go away!” And this little rhyme is not really like wearing the same socks to keep a win streak going; indeed, it’s all about knowing when to “fold” on the 2013 equity winning streak, take your cash and head to the beach. And there are even some statistics that bear out the claim that stock market returns in the May-September period do tend to run lower than over the remainder of the 12-month cycle commencing on May Day.

But as Rex Kramer (Robert Stack) warned us so memorably in the immortal movie, “Airplane,” when the hero pilot suggested an apparently obvious life-saving maneuver: “No, that’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do!”

Trusting the conventional wisdom

In this case, as in the past three years when “sell in May” seemed to work right (at least until about July), “they” are the hedge funds and other money managers who missed the Q1

If you'd put the sell in May and go away rhyme into practice, you would have exited the stock market this year at a time when the S&P 500 had risen 9.2%. Not a bad gain since the start of 2013.

However, should you prefer a more fine-tuned approach to the wholesale departure (if anyone in reality does that), you may choose to study the biggest individual winners and losers for their potential to reverse. Of course, in isolation, a stock's being down or up a lot is only one thing -- it's not much more thorough than the idea of simply shutting out the lights when the fifth month of the year arrives.

Nobody knows where we're going, only from where we've come, so shorting the strong and buying the weak doesn't guarantee you anything. But if you're inclined to start here, the bountiful and the woeful are as follows:

For this year, the stocks that have risen the most so far on the S&P are a little more diverse than the market's weak names. The top advancers have a bit of a consumer-services