Stocks have tended to rise and fall in the past with remarkable precision over specific time periods…
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Editor’s note: Yesterday, TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan explained why July 23 marks the end of a historically favorable seasonal window for the S&P 500. His message was simple: History often leaves clues worth paying attention to.
In today’s guest article, Keith explains why he spends less time trying to predict the future—and more time studying the patterns history has already revealed.
Instead of focusing on interest rates, earnings, or the latest headlines, Keith and his team analyze decades of market data to uncover recurring seasonal patterns. These patterns support TradeSmith’s Seasonality A tool that helps identify historically favorable buying windows across thousands of stocks.
If you missed him Breakthrough 2026 It happened, I advise you to watch the replay. Keith delves into how seasonality works, why he believes it can give investors an advantage, and how he applies it to today’s market.
Now, here’s Keith…
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Last Wednesday, the United States and Iran violated their second ceasefire in four months.
The Strait of Hormuz – the world’s most important oil corridor – has now been declared open and then closed again at least three times since February.
I’ll be the first to admit it: I didn’t see the Iran war coming, and I have no idea when it would end.
I’m clueless about where interest rates are headed too.
Will Kevin Warsh, the new Trump-appointed Fed Chairman, raise or lower interest rates?
I have no idea!
And don’t ask me to predict earnings for Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, or any of the other big AI companies. I can’t stand it.
And it’s not just me, no one else can either.
Just ask Wharton School professor Philip Tetlock. His long-term study, which tracked thousands of forecasts from political experts and economists, found that many of them performed barely better than chance.
Or as he famously put it, the average expert was as accurate as “a chimpanzee throwing arrows.”
That’s why, at TradeSmith, we don’t try to make predictions about the future. To know what comes next, we look to the past.
This includes seasonal patterns – calendar windows during which stocks have tended to rise and fall in the past With remarkable accuracy.
That’s why I tell people to forget the interest rate announcements… the earnings… the macro narrative… and all the other usual reasons to buy stocks.
All the money you could ever want to make in the market boils down to a few dates on the calendar. I’ll show you how this works in a moment – with 83% historical accuracy across 5,000 stocks dating back to the early 1990s.
First, a quick stop in ancient Egypt.
Use the past to see the future
The Nile River was the source of life for the people of ancient Egypt. It can also be a source of death and destruction.
Every July, it was flooded with astonishing regularity. The extent of the floods there was determined by whether Egypt was celebrating or starving that year.
Water shortages, crops failed. The floods destroyed villages, washed away irrigation canals, and drowned the crop before it could grow.
To know what was coming, the ancient Egyptians did not try to predict when rain would fall in the distant Ethiopian highlands and fill the tributaries of the Nile. They didn’t need that.
Instead, they built stone columns called Nilometers, sunk into the river bank. Each pillar bore markers recording how high past floods had risen, year after year, generations ago.
By reading centuries of these signs, Egyptians knew when to plant, when to reap, and when to store grain for a lean year. Not because they could predict the weather, but because they trusted those past patterns to hold.
As the river rose each summer, the priests observed its progress against every flood before it. If the water is rising faster than usual, this indicates a major flood. Slower means dryer.
By managing these rhythms, Egypt turned an unpredictable river into a reliable food source.
Taxes, grain stores and harvests were planned years in advance. All based on nothing more than centuries of marks on a stone wall.
Most investors don’t know that. They’re too busy trying to look into the future…
But like the Nile River, the stock market has its own “floods” and “droughts” — times when stocks predictably rise or deplete at specific times of the year based on decades of data.
This may be news to most average investors, but traders have been aware of these patterns for decades.
Traders have tracked these cycles for centuries
For example, commodity traders have long tracked planting and harvesting cycles in crops such as corn and wheat.
The gold market has also shown frequent seasonal trends, often strengthening during certain parts of the year associated with jewelry demand, central bank purchases, and annual festivals in India and China.
Stock investors have studied seasonal phenomena like the January effect for decades. Even the Wall Street adage — “sell in May and walk away” — comes from observed seasonal behavior, not theory.
The only thing that has changed is how closely these seasonal effects are tracked.
Today, we can detect these patterns across thousands of stocks, over decades of history, and measure them on specific days – not just months or quarters.
That’s what my team and I set out to do at TradeSmith.
We built software to analyze more than 2 quintillion historical prices across nearly 5,000 stocks, running millions of tests to answer a simple question: Is there an ideal time of year to buy—and an ideal time to sell—each individual stock?
When we have tested this approach over the past 18 years, the results have been remarkably consistent.
boston bear (Sam), for example, has entered the seasonal “green zone” every October 6 for the past 15 years — rising an average of 6.6% over the next 17 days:
SAM stock rose during the October window by 100% throughout. Fifteen out of 15 years – as you can see below:
nvidia (NVDA) did something similar on October 23 of each year, rising by an average of 6.5% over the next 18 days:
NVDA rose during that period in 13 out of 15 years. Even in 2015, long before many investors had heard of the company:
None of these moves were based on a specific earnings result…or any other news headline. They appear on the calendar, year after year, in bull markets and bear markets alike.
Zoom out, and the pattern remains at the portfolio level as well. A portfolio built around these calendar windows turned every $10,000 into $85,700 over 18 years.
These are the results that grab your attention, especially when the world seems less predictable now than ever.
Why is this important now?
Life in the 21st century can seem confusing.
We are constantly exposed to geopolitical shifts, economic threats such as inflation, and accelerating technological change – especially from artificial intelligence.
But you don’t need to predict the next geopolitical shock… the Fed’s decision… or know the future of AI and humanity… to grow your wealth. If professional forecasters so often get these forecasts wrong, what hope do we have of getting them right?
But you He does You need a way to understand when the odds are historically tilted in your favor – and when they are not. This is what makes seasonality so valuable.
That’s why I want to encourage you to do so Check out my replay Breakthrough 2026 It happened.
I’ll walk you through how we spot these patterns in stocks… why seasonality continues to work even when markets feel uncertain… and how you can use our software to discover hidden seasonal trends.
I’ll also share a free stock recommendation, so you can see how this works in real time – not just in backtests.
Markets will always feel the noise. And 2026 is no exception.
To gain an advantage, you have to know which signals to ignore, and which patterns have been there all along, hidden in the data.
Here’s the link again to watch the replay.
Keith Kaplan
CEO, Tradesmith
note: Subscribers told us this changed the way they thought about the market.
Mark S. expressed Simply put: “This is a life-changing system.” John B wrote to say he was simply hooked: “I love your trading courses. And your service.”
If you’re interested in a new way to make money this year — and a new type of investing — check it out Check out the replay here.
