Veteran traders, have you noticed a pattern in your yearly profits?

Are there months in the year for example where you’d typically make more money and months where you just incur more losses?

In the winter I tend to eat more pizza. Usually because its freezing outside and there’s nothing like a hot pizza.

October to December is a time where I have to make more money to keep up with the pizza demand, regardless.

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Fitting answer to your profile pic. :relaxed:

Sure.

December is usually a slow month for me. But also because I have a lot family in during the holidays and also travel. It wouldn’t be rare for me to not take a single trade from about mid December to say the 10-15th of January.

I wonder if there’s more behind this apparently simple question that’s worth looking at.

On the face of it, % profit should be in proportion to the number of trades. Assuming you don’t change your strategy, if 100 trades brings you 10% profit, then 200 trades should give 20% profit.

I can understand that in some months there will be fewer trades because the market is generating fewer opportunities but as far as I can tell forex market behaviour in the different months of the year is random. It would be an incredible feat if someone could look at unlabelled 1 month D1 charts and identify “This is July, this is February, this is December” and so on.

Or is there something else going on?

I posted a daily chart on this very point some time ago, covering a number of years. I think it was about Crude Oil, and it really was not possible to identify a consistent flat seasonal month recurring in every year.

But I think the reason why there are flat periods at various times is mainly a reflection of the diminished presence of speculative trading, particularly in the shorter timeframes. Summer holidays and Christmas are indeed periods when many traders are simultaneously absent from the market.

But economies continue regardless of the month concerned and major long term trends do not change from day to day. So I think one could conclude that the longer term position traders and the other market participants such as industrials and commercials continue their “business as usual”. But their business does not produce the typical intraday noise that many traders are looking at and therefore give an impression of a “dead market”.

This is also visible on various national one-day holidays when markets are partly closed globally, especially in the US. Markets are noticeably more subdued. but the world is still turning and the economies still evolving. If major events or news occur during these periods, whether they are during certain months or certain days, the markets will still move.

But when we talk about the speculative community, I don’t think we are really referring to the retail trade typical of the forum communities such as here on BP.

So I guess the issue of whether to trade in certain periods is more a matter of one’s own trading style than the market itself?

Just some “speculative” thoughts…

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Yeah, I like it. For years and years I have been trading indices, forex and occasionally commodities - but always on the D1 time-frame - through every month of the year with no month-specific outcomes.

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Here’s an interesting chart for SP500 that highlights a couple of current issues on BP including this thread’s question.

This is a monthly chart going back to 1995.

Not only would one not be able to clearly define certain month’s as no-go for trading, but it also shows an amazingly accurate result from a simple MA crossover system! Those moves are multiple thousands of pips per move.

If one were to look at this from the perspective of, say, a major pension fund, then it is not surprising that institutional investors/traders are deemed to be so much “better” than the average retail. But it is clear that most retail traders could never trade this kind of chart, waiting months and years for the next trade, but from an investment point of view and the “big players”, it is a very different kind of ball game on a very different kind of playing field - and they don’t, indeed can’t, close out for a month or a day and go fishing!

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Yeah I was also thinking about this, that it’s because people trade less during certain periods.

I see. You’ve been at this far longer than most people here, I trust this observation!

Makes sense!

Thanks guys for answering my question and taking it seriously! :blush: While I was already thinking there wasn’t really any pattern to yearly profits and it more depended on market behavior/your trades, I suppose another way to phrase it is if the market has some sort of pattern too - does that make sense? But yes, your answers have helped! Thank you!