Seasonal Trading Strategies – Why Use Seasonalities And Seasonality In Trading – Quantified Strategies For Traders And Investors

Last Updated on December 20, 2022

Seasonal trading strategies

The year has four different seasons and the financial markets have seasonal patterns that you can be made into seasonal trading strategies. Seasonal trading refers to seasonal patterns that occur at regular intervals in certain time frames. Let’s call them seasonal trading strategies for simplicity.

This article looks at why you should use seasonalities in trading strategies (seasonal trading). We explain what seasonality trading is, why seasonalities happen, and at the end, we give a long list of Seasonal Trading Strategies in stocks and how to use them.

If you are looking for a trading edge in the markets we believe seasonalities can offer you some strong and long-lasting edges. Many of them can’t be used on their own, but together with other parameters, seasonalities are a great trading tool.

Table of contents:

What is seasonality in trading?

Seasonality refers to patterns that occur at regular intervals in certain time frames. The study of time series data in many different assets shows that each asset has its own peculiarities or seasonalities from time to time. Perhaps the best well-known seasonality was the January Effect in stocks: stocks tended to rise in January (the effect seems weak lately).

Does a seasonal trading pattern happen with certain regularity?

No, a seasonal pattern doesn’t happen with 100% regularity. We are talking about statistics and averages.

The averages might indicate stronger performance during the winter than in the summer, for example, thus we have a seasonal trading pattern. It doesn’t mean we witness positive returns every winter, though. Even though a seasonal trading pattern can have a very positive average, it could be the result of outliers. If you have few observations to back the seasonality even 2-3 observations can explain most of the results. The win ratio in trading is important.

No seasonal trading pattern lasts forever. The above-mentioned January Effect was one of the most useful seasonalities until it stopped working. Stocks performed very well during the month of January for many decades until the 2000s. This pattern has dissipated over the last two decades.

An example of seasonality in gold

As an example, we can look at how gold has shown strong performance in January and August since 2006. The table below shows each month’s performance for GLD (the ETF that tracks the gold price):

Intraday seasonality in stocks

Another example of seasonality is the intraday movement in stocks. We can break down the trading day into three separate sessions: the opening session (1 hour), the midday session (many hours), and the closing session 30 mins to one hour). The volatility is different from each session: the midday session is calm while the two others have much more action.

Why use seasonalities in trading strategies

Understanding seasonalities is important in trading. Why is that?

The main reason for studying seasonalities is that we believe most of the anomalies you find in your backtests are camouflaged seasonalities. For example, the Turnaround Tuesday is mostly a result of a seasonality – not an anomaly. Where you see correlation in trading, it might just be a hidden seasonality.

Another reason for using seasonalities in trading is that they can be very valuable inputs into strategies by combining other parameters.

We use seasonalities extensively in our research and live trading, at least in our stock trading. We trade many seasonal trading strategies. The reason is simple: we believe most of the edges are structural and thus more likely to last year after year. For example, the turn of the month trading strategy is most likely a result of behavioral patterns, this we like to refer to it as a structural trading edge.

Drawbacks with seasonal trading strategies

One drawback with many seasonal trading strategies is the number of observations or the lack of observations. Noise and randomness are lurking at every corner in the financial markets, and you must be careful to conclude prematurely. An annual pattern obviously happens just once a year, and hence you need 30 years just to get 30 observations. This doesn’t hold up in any statistical test.

A general rule in trading is to have as many observations as possible. The very successful Medallion Fund only trades short-term patterns because they want a huge sample of observations. Keep this in mind when you are backtesting!

We have many seasonal trading strategies in our

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Backtested trading strategies

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Another drawback is that markets are non-stationary. Nothing lasts forever. The same applies to seasonalities and thus you have to make up for losses in seasonalities that stop working.

Why do seasonalities in trading happen?

We’ll briefly explain why seasonalities happen, although many are hard to explain. Jim Simons’ Medallion Fund is careful to ask why too frequently because the market consists of an unlimited number of causes and correlations and is thus extremely complex to understand.

Seasonalities in trading happen because of order flows

Let’s get back to the three daily sessions in the stock market: the open, the midday session, and the close. Why are the opening and closing sessions more volatile than the midday session? That is most likely because a larger portion of the order flow is happening around the opening and closing sessions.

Moreover, overnight news needs to be discounted and this might lead to further volatility for the opening session. We believe this is a structural seasonality and more likely to stand the test of time.

Seasonalities in trading due to weekdays, holidays, and news

We see the same seasonal tendencies on Mondays which are more volatile than other days. Our hypothesis is that investors discount news after the weekend.

Thus, there is a structural reason why we see more volatility around the open and the beginning of the week.

Regulatory and legal seasonal trading strategies

Many of the best edges in the market happen because of regulatory or legal implications.

Laws and regulations are legislated on an ongoing basis, and this has a lot of both wanted and unintended consequences. For example, when lawmakers make it difficult to sell stocks you can be sure there are loopholes to exploit. If many are not able to short, it might be easier for those who can.

Up until 2010 a lot of the trading in stocks went via the specialist on the NYSE (for NYSE stocks, obviously). This created a huge edge around the open and the close where you could get huge price improvement on order fills. This is (was) a regulatory seasonality.

Weather seasonalities in commodity trading strategies

When something is labeled as seasonalities we associate this with weather and climate. And for commodities, this might have huge impacts.

The commodity market, which is highly dependant on the weather, has many seasonalities. In the links below you can find some examples in three of them:

News seasonalities

The Friday Jobs Report is published on the first Friday of each month. This creates huge volatility in both bonds and stocks and has proved to be a very positive day for stocks over the last 30 years.

Overnight seasonal trading strategies

Practically all the gains in the S&P 500 over the last 30 years have come overnight from the close of the session until the open the next day. The S&P’s 10% annual return since 1993, including dividend reinvestment, has come from owning it overnight, and the day session from the open to the close has contributed almost nothing. This is an extremely strong seasonality!

We see the same pattern in gold miners (GDX): a strong drift upward overnight, while the day session is negative. Read more here about these patterns and how you can exploit them.

Seasonal Trading Strategies (List) – Is it seasonality in stocks?

We have already mentioned in this article many seasonalities in stocks: the overnight edge and the increased volatility trading strategy during the open and the close.

We trade mostly stocks and related indices. One reason for that is the many seasonalities you can find in both the broad indices and in subsectors.

For example, oil and oil stocks perform better in the first half of the year while many healthcare stocks have their best period during the summer when the overall market is weak.

But there are many more seasonal trading strategies. Below are just a few of the seasonalities we have covered and there are many more to clome (please register your e-mail in the right upper corner to get updates):

You can find many more among our free trading strategies.

Summary of why use seasonal trading strategies

Understanding seasonal trading is important to succeed in both trading and investing. Most of the anomalies you find in the markets are most likely camouflaged seasonalities. Keep this in mind and keep looking for seasonality in trading together with other parameters (or the other way around).

We regard seasonal trading strategies as one of the lowest hanging fruits in the market, both in stocks and commodities.