FAQs

Seasonality is a characteristic of price data which exhibits consistent and predictable movement that recurs every calendar year. It’s time to take advantage.

Service FAQs

What symbols do you cover?

All symbols and asset classes. Stocks, ETFs, Mutual Funds, Cryptocurrencies, Foreign Exchange, Futures.

How much data do you have?

As much as possible for each symbol. Often dating back to companies Initial Public Offerings (IPOs).

Do you support intraday seasonality for day trading?

Yes! Our premium plan includes intraday seasonality tools and alerts.

Can I cancel the subscription?

Yes, but we do not process any pro-rated refunds. Please take advantage of our one-week free trial.

What is a seasonal pattern?

An expected price move based on historical data that has shown similar price movements in the past.

Seasonality FAQs

What is seasonality trading?

Taking advantage of expected price movements during anticipated times of the year.

What is a seasonal pattern?

A characteristic of price data which demonstrates regular and predictable changes typically recurring at the same time each year.

What are the reasons seasonal patterns exist?

Humans are creatures of habit. Some patterns exist due to environmental factors such as weather. Holidays, vacation, work-life balance all create business cycles that create identifiable seasonal patterns.

How reliable are seasonal patterns?

Trading always involves risk. Things can change. We prefer seasonal patterns with the most amount of data we can find in order to give more statistical significance to seasonal trades. Prudent trading and risk management should never be overlooked.

What are the causes of seasonal trends?

There are various reasons such as environmental, farming, business cycles, interest rate policy, economic data releases, product launches and business conferences.

Is seasonal trading profitable?

Yes, there are many profitable traders such as Larry Williams and William Ziemba. The Stock Traders Almanac is another portfolio based on seasonality that has performed well over time.

What is a seasonality chart?

A chart showing the average movement of the included historical data. A seasonality chart highlights times of the year (or time of day for intraday) where price is more likely to move than others.

FAQs

Earning Season Trading

Public companies report their earnings either quarterly or at least annually. These moments where companies share their earnings estimates, earnings per share and revenue forecasts can present very unique seasonal patterns in the data. Large portfolio managers often look to accumulate shares ahead of the released numbers while prudent risk managers and market makers look to hedge any existing exposures. These natural market dynamics create powerful seasonal tendencies and directional patterns in the data that can be observed through seasonaltrading.com’s powerful tools and watchlists.

Seasonality Examples

Often seasonality presents itself in commodities or stocks that have natural operations or business dealings around certain periods of the calendar. For example, retail stocks experience spikes in sales volume, revenue and foot traffic during the holiday season while farmers and commodity producers experience seasonal harvest and planting seasons which make natural opportunities for end consumers and purchasers to hedge.

Seasonal Spread Trading

Spread trading is most common in commodity markets where deliverable future contracts have an expiration date. A trader may seek to buy the March contract and simultaneously sell the June contract. This position or difference between the two contracts is referred to as a spread. Spreads between different expirations or different commodities altogether can exhibit their own seasonal patterns and tendencies.

Spread trading is very common among professionals, commercials, and hedge funds alike. These are often less looked at by retail traders as it is often difficult to find accurate quotes of the spread itself. However, we aim to provide not only accurate pricing but seasonality insights for as many spreads as we can cover.

Seasonal Swing Trader

Swing trading usually consists of holding a position for more than a day and often a few days, weeks or even months while the trading position matures. Looking for shorter- term directional movement is often harder than long-term investing which focuses on the underlying business’s fundamentals. Seasonality and seasonal trading can often provide solid reasoning and logic as well as narrow the symbol universe for traders looking to enter profitable swing trades. Swing traders often lean on seasonality as a primary factor in their trading decisions due to the statistical nature and grounded logic behind the data.

Seasonal Trading Strategies

A trading strategy is a set of clear and objective rules to guide entry and exit of a trading position. A seasonal trading strategy is simply using seasonality to determine the entry and exit of a trade. A simple example may be to enter on the first trading day of the next month and to sell the position on the fourth trading day of that same month. The clear set of rules allows traders and investors to historically backtest the trading idea and gain a sense of expectation around how much a trade could potentially earn (or lose). Many professional traders use trading strategies as it allows them to remove their emotions which can cause for irrational behavior especially as larger sums of money are risked.

Trading Seasonals

Seasonal trading is one of the most popular approaches to financial markets and investing with success stories dating back hundreds of years. Many commodity and stock traders observed patterns that continue to this day. The stock trader’s almanac and other published sources document the history of trading seasonals quite well. Seasonality is often overlooked due to human nature’s desire to overcomplicate things that seem to require complexity. However, many traders have shown that seasonal trading can greatly reduce the complexity while still approaching the market in a sound manner.

Seasonal Stock Trading

Stocks and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) demonstrate seasonal opportunities of all shapes and sizes. The retail sector of the economy undoubtedly goes through an increase in revenue, sales, and more during the holiday season. Other parts of the economy like the energy sector have seasonal fluctuations as well during weather changes. No matter the industry or sector there is usually one or more seasonal factors that can affect the stock trading. A savvy investor should always consult seasonal patterns when stock trading to avoid buying before a seasonal lull or selling before a potential seasonal uptrend.

Seasonal Commodity Trading

Commodities such as oil, corn and wheat naturally go through seasonal impacts as producers, refiners, farmers and traders look to sure up their positions before, during and after the normal business cycle of the year. These actions create incredible opportunities that are as old as time. Seasonal commodity trading as well as seasonal spread trading is one of the most common approaches to successful trading and investing for decades. The patterns and data show incredible habits of all market participants around different parts of the year based on various factors of weather, transportation, consumer demand and of course normal business operations.

Seasonality Trades

Trading is often done considering various factors such as fundamentals, technical, economic data, sentiment but one of the most popular factors to traders and investors is seasonality as it can tell the story of what has happened and when it has happened by reviewing historical data.

The repeated price movement during certain calendar events or dates begins to emerge as a pattern of its own causing traders to take notice. Traders will naturally look to position themselves to capture the seasonality in an underlying stock, ETF or commodity which can begin to amplify the seasonality trade.

Seasonal Forecasting

Predicting future stock price movement is an incredibly hard task that is often the life- long challenge of many multi-billion-dollar hedge funds, banks and wealth managers. Other large multi-national corporations attempt to forecast ingredient costs, labor conditions and more. All forecasts can be improved by considering seasonality as there are undoubtedly influences that occur during different parts of the calendar that make material impacts on the world we live. Stock prices, commodity prices, currencies and more are all impacted by how consumers and the public traverse the seasons each year.

Day Trading Strategies

Opening range breakouts, chart patterns and volume weighted average price all provide interesting trading opportunities for day traders. However, seasonality is an often- overlooked source of edge for day traders. Knowing which stocks outperform on which day and at what time can help improve other day trading strategies or act as a standalone strategy for prudent risk managers. Look at our seasonal trading tool and the new intraday feature to find the best day trading strategies for tomorrow.

Swing Trading Strategies

Swing trades typically last a few days or even few weeks. This is the sweet spot for traders looking to turn over their capital quickly while avoiding the stress and required screentime of day trading. However, timing the market is a historically tough task as most performance data will show. Swing traders will look to chart patterns, technical indicators and seasonality to time their trades. A confluence or agreement of one or more factors can often help traders avoid poor trades while capturing more successful trades.

Trading Charts

To monitor a stock or commodities movements, many traders view trading charts. Trading charts are typically displayed showing bars or candlesticks. Each bar or candlestick is normally representative of one day showing the open, high, low and close of each day. Trading charts can help traders understand where a stock has been which may give insights into where a stock is headed.

Seasonaltrading.com aims to simplify the process while making the investors task much simpler. We display the historical data and allow traders and investors to quickly search how a stock has performed over any period of his or her choosing. Combine this data with a trading chart and the trader is off to the races.

Day Trading for Beginners

Entering a trade and exiting a trade on the same day is considered a day trade. Many countries and brokers limit the number of day trades a trader can make until their account is funded above a certain threshold. This rule is often known as the pattern day trader rule. Many beginning traders should tread lightly when placing day trades as markets can be unpredictable in short time horizons. Many that begin day trading will begin with trading charts, technical indicators, breaking news and chart patterns.

Seasonal trading can be a great intro to day trading as the intraday, one-day trades provided by the watchlist and Seasonaltrading.com application provide historical wins and losses along with the exact entry and exit times. This can provide simple to follow trade ideas for day trading beginners.

What is Intraday Trading

Intraday trading or more commonly referred to as day trading is the act of entering a trade and exiting the same trade within the same trading day. This trade could be opened when the market opens and closed when the market closes or can be for milliseconds as many high frequency trading firms do.

The most successful individual intraday traders steer clear from competing with Wall Street’s best in the high frequency trading arena; however, this does not preclude these individual traders from taking intraday positions or day trades. Many traders will use chart patterns, volume patterns, technical indicators, breaking news, seasonal patterns and more to make intraday trades.

Day Trading

The act of purchasing shares and selling the same shares within the same trading session. Day trading lives on the other end of the spectrum to long-term investing. Day traders look to make quick trades that last less than one calendar day with the hopes of executing a large quantity of these smaller trades which will ultimately lead to more profit than the original long-term investment.

Day trading is incredibly risky and very few succeed. However, with a solid game plan and approach, there are many success stories as well. Many day traders focus on order flow, trading charts, technical indicators, seasonality and breaking news.

Best Stocks for Intraday Trading Tomorrow

The total number of available stocks is in the thousands and that is only considering the United States’ stock market. How do you know which stocks are the best for day trading tomorrow? Many often look for which stocks have recent news or large pre or post- market jumps in price.

The simplest method to find the best stocks for intraday trading is to sign up to our seasonaltrading.com newsletter where we email you the best daily swing and intraday trades based on historical seasonal trends data each day. The email will arrive in your inbox about one to two hours before the market opens.

Intraday Trading Strategies

The best day trading strategies are often reckless and short-lived. We see traders make fortunes and lose fortunes as the market turns. Each trader smarter than the next thinking he will be able to side-step what his predecessor could not. Many intraday trading strategies look for similar price action around volume weighted average price, moving averages or other technical indicators based off of hourly or five-minute trading charts. Fundamentals and economic data are often too slow to capture intraday price action and are often neglected when constructing intraday trading strategies. Breaking news, order flow and seasonality are often complimentary and supplemental in creating the best intraday trading strategies.

Intraday Trading Stocks

Which stocks are the best for intraday trading? Often stocks with the most volatility and deepest volume. These stocks tend to be in the tech sector or are largely considered growth stocks. Day traders look for massive returns and large price movement to capture a small piece each and every day. There is no sure-fire way to know which stocks will be the best for tomorrow’s trading session but seasonality can help clue traders into what historically has moved on certain days of the week, during months of the year and more importantly what time of the day.

Best Intraday Strategy

Thousands of trading strategies exist for day trading including vwap, twap, momentum, opening range breakouts, fading support and resistance, breakout trading, seasonality, breaking news, knife catching and more. Which is the best intraday strategy? It is hard to say and often the market and trader will determine that over any given period. One determining factor to crown the best intraday strategy would be data. If a strategy cannot be proven or backed up by data then any serious investor or trader would have a hard time risking significant capital in pursuit of the strategy’s reward. Seasonality is easily quantified and historically verified. We encourage all traders to take the free trial to our application and newsletter to see how powerful seasonality can be for swing and day trading alike.

Stocks For Intraday

Momentum and growth stocks are much better suited for intraday trading than value stocks and blue chips. It is unlikely that McDonalds or Coca-Cola will provide enough intraday volatility to warrant day trading. The business will not change drastically from quarter to quarter thus providing very few trading opportunities outside the general ebbs and flows of the broader market. There are always exceptions to every rule, however. Seasonality can help identify historical periods where any stock, blue chip or growth, outperformed other stocks and its previous self. These insights and clues to market data can help a trader find the right timing to get in and out without having their capital tied up in a slow moving, legacy business.

Best Indicators for Swing Trading

Many traders focus on technical indicators but there is never a spoken consensus on what the best indicators are. In bear markets, many traders look to the simple moving averages to guide their longer-term investments. However, for short-term swing trading moving averages tend to be too slow or lag behind the bulk of the market’s move. Using faster moving averages is often helpful but not enough to crown moving averages the best indicator. Relative Strength, Moving Average Crossover and Divergence, Stochastics, VWAP, Volume profile and Seasonality are often debated as the most helpful for timing the market.

Shares to buy today for swing trading

No magical crystal ball exists, unfortunately. We do believe smart traders and watchlists work for some traders but it requires gut feel and deep market knowledge that ultimately, so few actually possess. A more robust approach would be to use statistics and data to find historical patterns that have shown profits in the past. Seasonality and seasonal trading provide insights into how stocks and ETFs behave during certain periods of the year. There is no guarantee that these patterns persist but at least the decision is rooted in data before entering the trade.

Shares to buy today for day trading

Follow our watchlist and newsletter to find the best stocks to buy each day of the week. We have scanned thousands of price data series and condensed the information into an easily digestible table and newsletter showing what stocks, what entry times, and what exit times have shown historical success. Please read disclaimers below as no trade can be guaranteed but confidence in data is greater than confidence in a guru or gut feel.

Good day trading stocks

Stocks that exhibit large swings and trading ranges are usually the best for day trading. The large swings give more cushion for the investor to harvest profits during the volatile swings from peak to valley. Stocks that obey support and resistance, have big news announcements or are in seasonally favorable times of the year are also better suited for day trading.

Check out the seasonaltrading.com watchlist and app in order to research your favorite stocks and find out when the best times of year have been in the past. You can also find out historical periods of the year where stocks have struggled which can also be worthwhile to your long-term trading and investing goals.

Short-term trading

A trade entered and exited in less than a few months should be considered short-term trading. Many short-term traders rarely hold for days or weeks in today’s current market. Day traders do not even hold their shares until the next day. Short-term trading is not suitable for all investors as it requires fast thinking, quick decision making, proper risk management and a unique eye for what stocks are best right now. Timing the market has been historically difficult. However, short-term traders and swing traders look for countless ways of finding the next best stock to own. Chart patterns, support and resistance, breakouts, momentum, technical indicators and seasonality are all time- tested timing methods.

Seasonal Investing

Investing is typically holding shares of stock for longer than a few months. Many swing traders believe investing is too slow but Warren Buffet and others would tend to argue. Another approach is to allocate your portfolio as you normally would but retain a small percentage of your capital for seasonal investing or swing trading.

Let’s say a trader or investor were to keep 10% of their portfolio in cash to be used as seasonal investment portion of their portfolio. This means that with a $100,000 account the trader would keep $10,000 for various seasonal trading positions while the remaining $90,000 would remain in their original investments.

Traders following this approach would then find the best seasonal opportunities to trade and as one trade is closed they could then locate another seasonal opportunity. The money would almost always be continually invested but would be in various market timing stocks based on historical tendencies.

Swing Traders vs Day Traders

A swing trader typically holds shares for a period longer than a day but shorter than a few months. A day trader does not hold a position longer than one day. Sure, day traders may have other investing accounts, but these surely are not considered part of his or her day trading strategy. The difference between swing and day traders is the holding time of their trades. Both swing traders and day traders may use similar factors for entry and exit such as trading charts, chart patterns, seasonality, technical indicators, momentum, news and more.

Seasonal Stock Trading Strategy

A popular seasonal stock trading strategy is to divide the allocated capital into equal portions. Each portion could then look for its own unique seasonal trade whether from your own research using the seasonaltrading.com application or from the A.I. suggested best trades watchlist. As a trade is exited that capital is then recycled into the next best trade entering the very next day. This process can be staggered so that the money is rotating at different intervals rather than all in and all out on the same day. However, both approaches are solid seasonal stock trading strategies if the trader or investor is comfortable.

Seasonal Stock Patterns

A seasonal stock pattern shows historically which entry date and which exit date produce the highest average return. These above average returns may attributed to seasonal factors like retail stocks surging before holiday season or energy stocks getting a bump into the cold winter. Travel, airlines and other consumer products may do well as spring and summer invigorate consumers to spend again.

Seasonal Tendency Charts

Imagine a chart that plotted each year’s price movement as its own line. It would seem clustered and like someone threw spaghetti noodles against the wall. A Seasonal Tendency Chart will analyze the spaghetti strings and find periods of time where all the spaghetti strings (more or less) were moving in the same direction. This average movement can be seen in almost every year of a stock’s price action meaning that in coming years it may be likely to repeat again.

Seasonal Tendency Charts are a powerful tool to give insights into market timing. The seasonaltrading.com application allows the trader to research any stock and view the average price action over the trader’s desired number of years back.

The takeaway is a nice clean line clearly showing the best and worst times to have been a shareholder over the past. There is no guarantee to repeat in future years but it does not stop baseball teams from shifting their in-fields based on a hitter’s tendency so why should it stop traders from shifting their portfolios?

Market seasonality chart

To see what is likely to happen next we must view what had happened in the past. Seasonality charts average the price movement over the course of each year and condense the information into a single average price line capturing all the stock’s movement. This data can lend insights into historically bullish and bearish times to own a particular stock or Exchange Traded Fund (ETF).

Hop over to our free trial in order to research your favorite stock or ETF and see how it has fared in the past. There is no cost to the trial and you will have full access to both the daily swing trading tool as well as the intraday seasonality tool which identifies hours of the day that were shown to be more bullish than bearish.

Seasonality in Stock Market

Stocks tend to move based on external factors that contribute to the underlying business. For example, energy stocks may sell off if the winter is expected to be warmer than anticipated. Or retail stocks may rise ahead of the holiday season assuming employment numbers are healthy. How can one capture these anticipated and historically significant price movements? These historical trends are often described as seasonality, a predictable and repeatable pattern observed in price data.

There is no guarantee that stocks will behave as they did in the past but it certainly does not hurt to understand where, when and how a stock tends to behave the way it does. Viewing the average historical price path over the course of the years can provide better market timing opportunities than relying on gut feel, analyst recommendations or your broker.

Seasonality Software

How can any trader view the seasonality in a stock, currency, ETF, crypto or commodity? We have built a very easy to use piece of software that is accessible with a free trial. The software is so simple that all you need to do is input the desired symbol you would like to view. We then pull up the most ideal time periods based on the historical data where you could have earned the most profit by buying on a certain date and selling on another date. This software also enables traders to filter by day of the week, month and to view by calendar date or trading day of the year. We have never empowered more traders than we are now. The game has truly changed.

Why Use Seasonality in Trading

We use tendencies in all phases of our life. If we know that traffic gets bad at a certain light each day at a certain time then we can start to adjust our route to avoid this. If a baseball team knows that a particular hitter always hits the ball to the left-side of the field then they can position their defense accordingly. Does this mean that traffic is guaranteed at that light? No (but probably yes). Does this mean the hitter will hit the ball to the left-side next at bat? No. But should we ignore tendencies in our life? No!

This is the same reason we should use seasonality in our investing and trading. If a stock exhibits certain behavior during a certain period of the year then why would we actively choose to ignore that information? If the hitter hits the ball to the left-side and we did not position the defense there then it is our fault. If we arrive at the light and wait in traffic at the bad time of the day then it is our fault. If we purchase shares only to see historically they performed poorly during this month then we should also share some fault in this despite having no say in the company’s operations. It is blunt but often true. We cannot know for sure but we can look to help ourselves.