Depending on how you look at it, August may not have been as bad a month for stocks as advertised. For the month as a whole, the MSCI all-country world stock index  lost more than 7.5 percent.  This was the worst performance since May last year, and the worst August since 1998.

But if you had bought in at the low on August 9, you would have gained  healthy 8.5 percent or so.

Reuters asset allocation polls for August are out. They show very little change from July, which suggests investors are still cautious and uncertain about what is happening.

One big difference, month-on-month, was a large jump into investment grade corporate debt.  Andrew Milligan of Standard Life Investments reckons this  may in part  have been because  sovereign debt rallied so much over summer that returns from government bonds are now too meagre.