This Tool Helps You Counter “The ‘25 Surprise” VIEW IN BROWSER
 | BY KEITH KAPLAN
CEO, TRADESMITH |
Seven months ago, at the start of 2025, we warned you to expect the unexpected. Then three weeks later the new president, with his ambitious agenda, told us point blank to expect rapid change on Inauguration Day. Through tariffs, major Supreme Court decisions, controversies, and a hugely stimulative tax bill, we’re certainly getting it. Still, through all these major changes, unknowns persist… And for most investors, unknowns are one of the most anxiety-inducing things for the market. We saw it firsthand in April. The Liberation Day tariffs surprised everyone, with far more extensive and punishing levies than anyone expected. Volatility soared as the S&P 500 cratered as much as 20% from the all-time highs, and investor and consumer sentiment plummeted. Then, as word of trade deals started to pour in and lowered tariffs along with it, the fear faded… and stocks charged to new highs. There are still plenty of unknowns on the horizon, the biggest being the ever-teased details about major trade deals with China, Europe, and other big trading partners. That and the Federal Reserve’s next rate move. But frankly, if you ask me, it’s not worth worrying about these unknowns. They’re out of our control. And while there are still some things coming in 2025 we won’t know until we face them, at TradeSmith, we’ve created a tool to give you an edge no matter what surprises come about. We have uncovered a way to solve one of the biggest unknowns in trading: the absolute best times of year to buy and sell any asset… … all based on measurable, tangible patterns. How Seasonals Have Fared in 2025, and What Lies Ahead To the naked eye, stocks seem to trade erratically, whipping upward one day only to plummet the next – even after good news. But there are stocks that trade so consistently… rising (or falling) sharply during specific windows of time, year after year… that you can use their data to map out an entire year of great trades. It’s just like how farmers make their plans for the year. For thousands of years, farmers have known to sow seeds in spring, tend crops in summer, and harvest the bounty in the fall. Humans have used this dependable, seasonal pattern in nature to cultivate for thousands of years… without knowing the first thing about Earth’s orbit. Just as dependably, stocks go through seasonal cycles, too. But even better than the agricultural cycle, you can know down to the veryday the best time to buy or sell any given stock. A couple years back, we developed an easy-to-use tool to help you identify these seasonal patterns. And earlier this year, we designed a trading strategy using this tool that helps you beat the market by only being in the best stocks at any given time. It’s already shown us some useful signals in 2025… and there are more to come. Just look at the seasonality chart below of Meta Platforms (META)… That first seasonal period, from Jan. 18 to Feb. 2, showed that META had a tendency to rise 10% on average between these dates for the last 15 years: 
Going back to 2013, it’s only been down two years during this span. This time around, META did even better… running more than 13% higher. Why is this short window such a great time for META? You might say it’s the quarterly earnings report… but those have been a mixed bag the past few years. Just look at the ’22 outcome, where META lost more than 25% overnight after missing expectations for its fiscal Q1 earnings. We can’t always say why stocks do what they do, and they still do it. The why doesn’t necessarily matter. Instead, we can simply recognize that META has gained 10%, on average, between Jan. 18 and Feb. 2 during the past 15 years and draw our own conclusions. Will it play out the same way next year? There are never any guarantees. But what we can know for sure is that this year’s data will contribute to META’s track record… and give us that much more confidence in future trades. Nvidia (NVDA), meanwhile, is on its 14th year in a row to rise during the “green zone” we identified from May 24 to Aug. 22. That’s a long time – and it just keeps climbing: 
But you can put in just about any ticker you want – or screen for lots of different stocks – and I do that all the time myself. For example, I thought it was fun to see how well the wild action in Opendoor Technologies (OPEN) lines up with our “green zones”… and the “red zones,” too: 
That one’s more of a meme stock, so between that and only five years of data to work with, there’s no telling what happens next. But I share this data just to show you how you can plan your trades on any stock… down to the day. See, most people who recognize the power of seasonality can’t get that specific about it. They can show you which sectors tend to perform best in the summer or the winter, sure, and they can attempt to explain why so you’ll feel confident in their conclusion. But typically stock pickers don’t have the data or the firepower to crunch all the different numbers and say: For any particular stock, which is the best day of the year to buy… then sell? Even when you can plot out a whole year’s worth of seasonality, as we do at TradeSmith, some days are still far better than others. We highlight those days for you as the green zones you saw on my charts here today. Really, I could go on all day showing you different seasonal patterns in various stocks. With a quick TradeSmith screener for seasonality, I was able to find 16 of them with a high-probability bullish pattern starting in August, averaging 10% to 20% gains in the next couple of months. This is one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve ever had at TradeSmith. It has allowed us to recommend trades more confidently than ever before in 2025 – because we know which stocks will offer us high-probability trades months ahead of time. But I am only interested in bringing you a trading strategy that could win at least 80% of the time. And when we backtested our seasonality system with all sorts of different criteria, we actually discovered that the simplest strategy was the most effective… We narrowed it down to a two-step process for selecting these trades. And in our 18-year backtest, we had a positive average return every year: 5.96% overall, with an average hold time of 19 days. Keep racking up those wins that frequently throughout the year, and you could see a 118% annualized return. Even the worst year in our backtest – 2007 – saw an average trade of 2.5% and an annualized return of 37.9%. Far better than the S&P 500 will earn you in any year (but especially in 2007!) And overall, testing this strategy over 18 years showed 857% growth – more than twice what the S&P delivered over the same period: 
In this replay of Tuesday’s webinar, I show you everything I can about this strategy and how we will use it to find you the most reliable stocks to trade throughout the year… on their very best days to buy. Click here to watch to learn more about these seasonality signals – one of our biggest breakthroughs in 2025. All the best, 
Keith Kaplan
CEO, TradeSmith | 
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