Saturday marks the first day of spring, and if history is any indication, the stock market is ready to bloom.

Winter’s Santa rallies and the January Effect may garner more attention, but spring is an unusually bullish season for stocks. Over the last 30 years, the S&P 500 index has climbed an average of 1.8% in April and 1.5% in May, making that stretch the best back-to-back months of the year — outperforming even the typical rallies of November and December.

Recently, those hefty returns have stretched into a third month. Over the past 10 years, the three-month period from March through May has yielded by far the strongest results for stocks and ETFs, says Ryan Detrick, chief technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. 

Of course, these effects are often dwarfed by larger economic trends and analysts warn against putting too much faith in the position of earth relative to the sun. For example, “last year’s rally helped strengthen the seasonal averages,” Detrick says.

Still, market watchers agree there are real cyclical patterns in seasonal trading. Investors who exited stocks after the holidays may spot more lower valuations in the spring – at least in some sectors. “You get a dip in January and February,” says Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald. “You come down, you hit a low, and then you see there’s an opportunity to jump in and then they move back into the sectors.”

SmartMoney wanted to find out which sectors perform best during the spring, so we gathered the monthly returns of 12 sectors for the past decade and crunched the numbers ourselves. Here’s what we found.

Business services and consumer services were the best-performing sectors for the most spring months (March, April and May) over the last 10 years. The industrials sector was a close second. And energy performed well, too.

Why are business services a springtime buy? Let’s take a closer look at the sector. It’s made up of employment services, services to buildings and dwellings and office administrative services. Analysts say those kinds of businesses benefit during the spring because they’re most likely to be undervalued in late winter.

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