In August 1854, a terrifying illness swept through Soho, London, during one of the hottest summers the city could remember.
People were dying in hours – by the hundreds.
Medical authorities blamed “miasma” – or bad air – seeping from open drains, rotting refuse, and poorly ventilated slum housing. Newspapers warned of “poisonous vapors” rising from the city streets.
John Snow, a pioneering London physician, wasn’t convinced.
In earlier outbreaks, he’d noticed that people who did not share air were falling ill, while others who breathed the same air remained healthy.
Instead, what the victims shared was water. To test his suspicion, Snow mapped the Soho outbreak.
Armed with a notebook and a street map, he walked the neighborhood, marking each death with a short black line.
As the marks accumulated, a clear picture emerged. The deaths clustered around a single point – a public water pump on Broad Street.
A copy of John Snow’s 1854 map of deaths in Soho, London
The illness was cholera – a fast-moving waterborne bacterial disease – and when officials removed the pump handle, the outbreak stopped.
Once someone knew where to look, what looked like chaos turned out to be structured.
Many complex systems behave the same way. On the surface, they appear noisy and unpredictable. But when you step back and study them over time, recurring patterns begin to emerge.
The Stock Market Is No Different
I know because my team and I at TradeSmith have developed cutting-edge software that identifies recurring seasonal patterns in thousands of stocks – specific times of year when they tend to rise and others when they tend to fall.
And there are some fast-approaching seasonal windows that you need to be aware of. That’s why we hosted an online event called Prediction 2026 about what’s coming. (Catch the replay right here.)
Seasonality Affects Markets, Too
Commodity traders, for example, have long tracked planting and harvest cycles in crops like corn and wheat.
Energy traders watch seasonal demand shifts tied to winter heating and summer cooling.
The gold market has recurring seasonal tendencies, often strengthening during certain parts of the year tied to jewelry demand, central bank buying, and annual festivals in India and China.
And stock investors have studied phenomena like the January Effect for decades. Even Wall Street’s old saying – “Sell in May and go away” – comes from observed seasonal behavior, not theory.
But seasonality doesn’t just apply to commodities and the big stock market index. Every stock has its own seasons to rise or fall – a kind of summer and a kind of winter, too – year after year.
Big-box retailer Target (TGT) provides a good example.
As one of America’s largest retailers, this stock moves with the rhythms of consumer spending throughout the year. But for all the money won – and lost – on Target over the last few years, there’s one certainty…
Between June 22 and July 21, you want to buy the retail bellwether. Target has moved up an average of 5.2% during that summer period, rising 100% of the time over the past 15 years:
That’s 15 years of summertime price spikes, starting long before it fell under the pandemic-era spotlight. And in 2025, the pattern held true: Target rose 10.3% during its 29-day seasonally bullish window.
The chart you’re seeing above is from one of the breakthrough innovations from TradeSmith’s team of researchers, software engineers, and quant investors: our ground-breaking Trade Cycles Seasonality tool.
It’s an easy-to-use tool that can take one of thousands of commonly traded stocks, analyze its movements, and point out its strongest seasonality trends – with starting periods narrowed down to the day.
A Powerful New System for Seasonal Profits
Target is just one example among many.
Our development team has fine-tuned this tool to uncover seasonality cycles in stocks, stock market indexes like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, as well as in currencies and commodities.
By crunching the data and compiling the historical movements of thousands of different assets and running 50,000 tests a day to analyze every stock in the major indexes, we’ve built a powerful system to help predict the biggest jumps on 5,000 stocks.
Over our 18-year backtest, these seasonal trades delivered 857% in total growth. That’s more than twice what the S&P 500 delivered over the same time.
Even in 2007, the worst year in our testing, we saw an average gain of 2.5% per trade and an average annual return of 37.9%. That’s close to four times the long-term average annual gain of the S&P 500.
The question now is: How can we make this powerful system work for you?
The first step is checking out the replay of our Prediction 2026 event right here.
You’ll learn about the breakthrough innovations from our team of researchers, software engineers, and quant investors with the ground-breaking Trade Cycles Seasonality tool.
It’s so powerful that it points out the strongest seasonality trends for stock, indexes, currencies, commodities and more – with starting periods narrowed down to the day.
Regards,
Keith Kaplan
CEO, TradeSmith