Seasonality in Futures (Feb 9, 2000)

"I am after an up-to-date book on seasonals in the futures market, I know you published one many years ago, and is out of date, I think Jake Bernstein had a few books on it to some years ago, but I gather these only covered up to the 80's Courtney, do you know of a more up to date book showing all the seasonals in all the contracts for the main commodities please????
Thanking you -J.L."

Editor-in-Chief Courtney Smith: Thanks for the enquiry!
Yes, I published a book back in 1987 on seasonality in futures prices. However, that book is now woefully out of date. The two best sources of information on seasonality are now Jake Bernstein and Moore Research. Mr. Bernstein publishes two different types of information.
The first is the classic seasonal charts that show an idealized chart of the seasonal price pattern for the year. This is very similar to the charts that I published in my 1987 book. I think that they are generally adequate for getting the broad trend of seasonality. However, I have publicly disagreed with the way Mr. Bernstein constructs the charts. My main problem is that I cannot find any detrending in his calculation of the seasonals. This is important because there are some futures, such as gold, that have been in major trends for many years and this trend can distort the seasonals. The second type of information could more accurately be called data mining to find possible seasonals. In this case, a computer program simply goes through all possible combinations of buying and selling all dates for all commodities. For example, what happens when I buy March copper on Jan 1 and sell on Jan 2. What happens if I buy on Jan 1 and sell on Jan 3? And so on. This then gives a list of different trades that typically coincide with the seasonally best times of the years.
Mr. Bernstein has two different products that I recommend. We gave an Editor's Choice Award to his Trade Your Way To Riches course. The key was not that it was a good course but that it contained very valuable seasonal information. The second product is a CD containing the seasonal key dates. We have not reviewed it officially but it looks very good to me. Both of these solutions are recommended.
You can contact Jake Bernstein's company at (847) 291-1870.
Moore Research offers another form of data mining similar to that used by Mr. Bernstein. The newsletter that we track in Commodity Traders Consumer Report is based totally on data mining seasonal type trades. We don't review newsletters but I can tell you that I use their report in my own trading and I am a professional money manager. That should tell you what I think of the newsletter. They can be contacted at (541) 484-7256 or on the web at: http://www.mrci.com

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