| 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. Their bodies lost fluid so fast that their skin shrank and their lips turned blue. Victims collapsed where they stood - on stairwells, in courtyards, on their doorsteps. 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. 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're hosting an online event all about what's coming - Prediction 2026 - next Tuesday, January 20, at 10 a.m. ET. Ahead of the event, we've unlocked a trial version of our groundbreaking seasonal software. It allows you to look for seasonality patterns in the stocks you own or are thinking of buying. So, make sure to register for that here to unlock your free access. Then read on for more on the seasonality phenomenon in markets - and how, over the last 15 years, some stocks have followed their seasonality windows with 100% historical accuracy. Seasonality Affects Markets Too Commodity traders 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 indexes. 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. | 
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