Seasonal Stock Market Trends: The Definitive Guide to Calendar-Based Stock Market Trading 

This was an interesting book and easy to read, but ultimately unsatisfactory. The first issue was that there was no accounting of transaction costs – which is completely unrealistic. The second issue is that the data used to confirm his ideas was the same data that were used to generate the idea – a very serious problem.

In any event, I was interested enough to test his ideas.

As the book was written some time ago the data from 2007 to 2019 were out of sample. This gave 3271 data points. I used the KTI as described in Chapter 9. There were 693 times where the strategy called for a change (transaction out & in, so 1384 transaction costs – that’s not cheap). The overall gain using KTI (ignoring transaction costs) was 95%. A simple buy and hold strategy yielded 128% gain (and would have avoided the transaction costs).
It may be possible that implementing parts of the strategy might yield superior results but, to some extent, that is also poisoning the data and should be approached cautiously, if at all.
Still, some interesting ideas and a completely approachable book. Just be cautious implementing the ideas.

The book was well written and informative. I had heard of a lot of the trends in the past, but there were several that were new to me as well.

I recently subscribed to […] The site researches stocks to uncover historical trends based on calendar as well as company earnings releases. I have found that using their research along with some simple technical analysis produces very good results.

This is a well written book about a very useful topic for Traders. I have used the Seasonal Stock Trading technique for many years now and have been quite profitable doing so.
HOWEVER, to really get good results out of Seasonal Stock Trading .. you need to have a service like Blashing.com to get Seasonal data and graphs for every stock or ETF. They also have a Seasonal Stock Scanner which finds the best stocks to buy and sell for every period of the year.
So, using the Seasonal Stock Trading technique learned from this good book along with having access to good, reliable Seasonal data and graphs is a very profitable method to Trade Stocks.

All was as expected

This book is an interesting read and Jay shares some extremely powerful seasonal patterns that are simple to incorporate into your existing trading models.

Good eye opening book on seasonals. I like how he keeps iterating with more discretion and using leverage instead of adding more rules. It needs a 2nd edition soon, the data stops around 2007-2008 so you have to run your own backtest using recent data. Jay seems down to earth, theory is definatley worth considering.

The is a trading book that I’ll come back to again and again. Jay is pretty rigorous in his testing, and some of The seasonal patterns he’s found defy belief…and yet there they are, as plain as day.

The book was written a few years ago, but that’s actually a good thing, as you can then research for yourself the “out of sample” data of the subsequent time period, and see for yourself if the patterns are still holding up.

My one quibble, which is minor, is that the longer-term patterns (4- Or 10-Year patterns for example) simply haven’t had enough data points in the last 120 yrs or so to be truly meaningful. But the astute reader can decide for him/herself whether there’s signal in the noise.

Jay also has a great and humorous writing style, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a book on historical trading patterns that is this light and amusing. A must-read.

The book should actually be called “Calendar Investing”, because it conserns itself with how the market performs on a calendar, not Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.

That being said, the book stays on topic and makes its points clearly. The book goes into broader details and also micro details, but always on topic.

A minor drawback is that each chapter has useless introductions and conclusions. We were taught (badly) in school that we are supposed to indiscriminately pad our writing with such filler. A much better way to present technical material is the DRY approach (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Besides the introductions/conclusions, the author also sometimes repeats himself in-chapter (“as we discussed earlier…”). Personally, I want to read high quality information, and only high quality information, exactly once. But these writing inefficiencies are not enough to take a star away. So I still give the book five stars.