Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The usage of seasonality

I'm currently reading a book titled "How I Trade For A Living" written by Gary Smith. The book expose you to many of the author's insights in the stock market.

One of the chapters in the book deals with seasonality and how to take advantage of it. The author write about a research conducted by Norman Fosback which shows that the market has bullish bias during the last trading day and first four trading days of each month. Further more, this bias is evident in the two days before each holiday. These days sum up to 28% of all trading days a year. Fosback run a simulation which traded only during these days from 1928 to 1994. The hypothetical account grew from 10,000 to 4.6 million dollar.

In his book, Gary note that even though this research is old he uses this knowledge and it still works for him. What puzzles him (and me) is that patterns like this are usually evaporate in the course of time as people take advantage of them, however the seasonality pattern seems to be still valid. If we examine yesterday's behavior we can see that it is exactly what happened. Lets wait till the end of the month and see if it will work as well.

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