Researching a symbol's seasonality on the AnalyticsFX terminal
The Seasonalities tab plots how a symbol has actually moved through the calendar across decades, with a per-year breakdown and a multi-lookback robustness check, so you can use seasonal tendencies as bias confirmation rather than a party trick.
Most traders treat seasonality as a party trick: "stocks go up in November." The Seasonalities tab on the AnalyticsFX terminal treats it as research. It plots how the symbol you are looking at has actually behaved through the calendar year, averaged across decades of history, so you can see when a market has tended to trend, range, or reverse, and how reliable that tendency really is.
The seasonality curve
The main chart plots the average path of the selected symbol across the calendar year. Flat stretches are periods with no consistent direction. Sloped stretches are where the market has historically drifted one way more often than not.
The control that matters most is how many years feed the average. More years give you more signal and a smoother, more statistically grounded curve. Fewer years give you more recency, which matters when a market's character has changed. Reading the same symbol at a short and a long lookback and comparing the two is the first thing to do.
Mark a window and read the stats
A curve on its own is a shape. To turn it into numbers, drag across the chart to mark a window, for example a two-week stretch in late spring. Two things fill in:
- Window stats. Aggregated statistics computed across every historical year that falls inside the window you marked.
- Per-year breakdown. A table with one row per historical year inside the window: start and end date, the prices, the profit percentage, and the maximum favourable and adverse move along the way.
The per-year table is the part most seasonality tools hide. An average return of 3% means something very different if it came from fifteen quietly positive years versus three huge years and twelve flat ones. The breakdown lets you see the dispersion instead of trusting the headline.
Check it across lookbacks
Underneath, a multi-lookback chart overlays the calendar-year curve at several lookback windows at once: 5, 10, 15, and 20 years, and longer when the symbol has the history for it, out to 60 years. The point is agreement. When the 5, 10, and 20 year curves all point the same way during a given week, the tendency is robust across timeframes and not an artifact of one era. When they disagree, the edge is fragile. You can toggle any lookback on or off from the legend to declutter the comparison.
The lookback stats card turns this into figures: for the range you selected, it compares the annualised return, win rate, and Sharpe across each lookback window, with a bar for the magnitude of return per window. That tells you which lookback is actually carrying the edge.
Seasonality is a tendency, not a signal
This is the part to internalise. Seasonality is a prior, not a trigger. A strong seasonal window is a reason to lean into a thesis you already have, or to veto one that fights the calendar. It is not a standalone entry. The traders who get value from it use it to size conviction and timing, then let their actual setup pull the trigger.
Research view versus the screener
The Seasonalities tab is a deep dive on one symbol: you bring the symbol, it tells you everything the calendar knows about it. The Screener tab works the other way around, ranking the best seasonal windows across the whole universe so you can discover candidates you were not already watching. Use the screener to find, use this view to research.
How to start
Open the AnalyticsFX terminal, switch to the Seasonalities tab, and pick a symbol. Set the lookback to something long to read the base tendency, then drag a window over a stretch that interests you and read the per-year table and the lookback stats. Flip to a shorter lookback to check whether the recent years still agree.