Predicting the Future with Simple Planning Tools

Investors are bombarded with predictions about interest rates, inflation, earnings, and geopolitics every day. Keith Kaplan, CEO of TradeSmith, thinks most of that is noise. He believes one of the market’s most reliable signals isn’t found in the latest headline – it’s found in the calendar.

By analyzing decades of market history, Keith and his team uncovered recurring seasonal patterns that have appeared across thousands of stocks with surprising consistency. These patterns can help remove emotion from investing and offer a valuable edge in today’s unpredictable market.

Using the Past to See Into the Future

The ancient Egyptians didn’t try to predict when rain would fall in the distant Ethiopian highlands and fill the Nile’s tributaries. Instead, they built stone columns called Nilometers, sunk into the riverbank, to record how high past floods had climbed, year after year, going back generations.

By reading centuries of those marks, the Egyptians knew when to plant, when to harvest, and when to store grain for a lean year. This approach can be applied to the stock market, which has its own “floods” and “droughts” – times when stocks predictably surge or dry up at specific times of the year based on decades of data.

Seasonal Patterns in the Stock Market

Commodity traders have long tracked planting and harvest cycles in crops like corn and wheat.

Stock investors have studied seasonal phenomena such as the January Effect for decades. Even Wall Street’s old saying – “Sell in May and go away” – comes from observed seasonal behavior, not theory. Today, they can discover these patterns across thousands of stocks, over decades of history, and measure them down to specific days – not just months or quarters.

Keith Kaplan and his team built software to analyze more than 2 quintillion historical prices across roughly 5,000 stocks, running millions of tests to answer a simple question: Is there an optimal time of year to buy – and an optimal time to sell – each individual stock? When they tested this approach over the past 18 years, the results were remarkably consistent.

Seasonality Matters Now

Markets will always feel noisy, and 2026 is no exception. To get an edge, investors need to know which signals to ignore – and which patterns have been there all along, hidden in the data. By focusing on seasonal patterns, investors can make more informed decisions and potentially achieve better returns, similar to those who find cheap AI stocks still worth buying after a selloff.

They can make more informed decisions.