More new features in Time & Timing—May 4, 2009

The Index Page was beginning to get a bit unwieldy and require scrolling (which we hate) in order to see all of T&T’s possibilities.  So, we’ve created sub-index pages (menus, if you like), which are more easily accessible.  In essence, we’ve traded 1 click for a scroll—and clicking is much faster.

The Seasonal Analyses menu contains T&T’s Seasonal Futures, Seasonal Spreads, Monthly Stats, and The Scorecard.

The Historical Analysis menu contains The Big Enchilada (universal histories), The SpreadMaster, T&T’s If-Then Studies, Analog Years, Big Moves and the Aftermath, and Market Snapshots.

The Event-Driven menu contains Moving Average Crossover Studies, End-Of-Month Studies, Holiday Studies (new!), Full Moon Studies (just for fun), and our brand-new ANYDAY studies.  More on that below

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Lots of new features for our subscribers—April 20, 2009

We’ve spent April adding a flock of new features for you.

First, not really a feature, but our phone number has changed.  It’s now (314) 828 7388 in the US.  Please feel perfectly free to give us a buzz any time you have a question, a suggestion for a new feature, or (oops!) encounter a problem!

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Time & Timing, Mark II…faster, and with new features

Finally, after innumerable delays and technical problems, Mark II of T&T is here.

We hope you’ll like the leaner, faster format of the Query pages, and the large number of new links we’ve added to the various history pages.

Also, we’ve added several new features for you.  First, ‘’Quickies’’.  By simply entering a ticker symbol in the text box next to Quickies, you can find out immediately A) any seasonal trading ideas coming up, B) the 15-year history of your market over the next 45 days, C) the partially optimized price history of your market over the next 45 days, D) the 5- and 11-year histories of the behavior of your chosen market during each month of the year, and E) a comparison study of this year’s price behavior in your market to previous years, with a view toward finding the best analog years.

As usual in T&T, on any of these pages, you can click on what’s all this mean? to find out complete details of what each page represents.

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For More Information or to Get Some Assistance

We are very interested in hearing from you if you have questions, find a bug or an error, or would like to suggest a feature.

If you’re reporting a bug or requesting support, please be sure to include as many details as possible.

Contact us by telephone:

314.828.7388

Or, you can send email to:

When you can’t find it, you create it yourself

Time & Timing traces its history to the famous ‘Voice from the Tomb’. This was a set of trading ideas that was enormously popular in the 1960s and 1970s.  Someone, whose name we’ve never known, and using only pencil and paper (!), studied decades of grain prices and came up with an optimized set of entry and exit dates in many markets.  These types of studies have come to be known since as ‘’seasonal’’ studies.

In 1974, a young broker working for the largest retail futures brokerage of the day, Clayton Brokerage Company of St. Louis, had an idea.  The recent advent of minicomputers had lowered business computing costs radically, thought he, so why not use a computer to replicate and update the ‘Voice from the Tomb’ for all futures markets.  The clients already loved the Voice’s analyses, wouldn’t a ‘modern’ computerized analysis be even more appealing to them?  A killer marketing idea, so the broker thought, years ahead of then-current industry research.  The company could lease out the results of the research, too, for nice hefty fees.

Well, the company, for whatever reason, wasn’t interested.  In fact, it was downright hostile to the broker’s idea, He became disgusted and left the futures industry shortly thereafter, spending the next 30-odd years designing customized computer applications for business.

As it happens, I was that broker, and I forgot about the idea of a ‘’master’’ analysis of seasonal trading ideas.  In 1991, I was asked.to design a risk-management system for a copper smelting company, and while doing so kept running into—guess what?—seasonal tendencies in the price of copper.  This rekindled my old idea; surely by now, someone had written that master analysis, right?

If someone had done so, I couldn’t find it.  Spent about 6 years looking for it, and the only similar ideas and products I found were at proprietary trading desks in banks and commodity funds.  They were perfectly happy to lease out their ideas and their software, though — at upwards of $20,000 per month.  Uhh, no thanks.

A little frustrated at this fruitless search, I began writing some programs to do various historical and seasonal analyses on futures markets.  Over 5 or 6 years, the number of these programs became pretty substantial, and several trader friends kept asking for their results. I was writing a book for John Wiley & Sons at the time, and wasn’t too interested in doing generalized research for my friends.  That is, until one day when one of them said, “Stu, you dummy, why don’t you put your databases up on the Web?  If Don (another friend) and I want this kind of research, don’t you think that lots of other people will, too?”

He was right, of course, and I began working on what would become Time & Timing in 2005.  I won’t waste your time with a lot of puffery, but the plain fact is that Time & Timing is an outstanding research product.  It will save you enormous amounts of research time.  It will be invaluable in helping you find trading ideas and refine your trading strategies.  Bottom line? It will help improve your trading and your profitability.  (It’s also great for settling bets, like ‘’What was the first year (or the first exact day) that Chicago Wheat traded over $6.00?)

Also, Time & Timing is driven by you, our subscribers.  Have an idea, or a suggestion, or a type of analysis you’d like to see?  Tell us, and we’ll implement it (if we can, of course) — fully one-third of Time & Timing’s many features have come straight from our subscribers, and we simply love suggestions.

Be our guest. Try it out, free.

Time & Timing is completely free for a full month — the whole site, not just one or two parts .  One more thing:  when you’re using T & T, if you have any questions or encounter any problems, please contact us via either our Feedback feature or via phone during any business day.  We believe firmly in giving top-notch service to our subscribers, and will be delighted to assist you ... anytime!

Best wishes, and good trading to you!

Stu Johnston
your friendly neighborhood proprietor of Time & Timing

New in Time & Timing!

October 1, 2008

Time & Timing’s new Mark II version has a wealth of new features, a new subscriber interface that lets you use T&T much more quickly, and much more interplay among T&T’s various analysis tools.

Two new departments.  The first is ‘’Quickies’’—just type a market ticker symbol, press [Enter], and T&T will show you several pages of results of T&T’s analyses for that market with just 1 click per page.  It doesn’t get any faster than Quickies!

The second is Moving Average Crossover Analysis.  The notion that one duration of a moving average is useful for all markets is simply nonsense, and has bothered us for years.  Now, using T&T, you can quickly find which moving averages for which markets have had the highest predictive effect in their respective markets in recent history.

In a number of T&T’s departments, there’s a new link on the ‘history’ page(s) of the market(s) you select:  recent seasonal trades.  Click this link, and you’ll immediately see how well recent seasonal trades in that market have done.  Every year, some markets follow their historical seasonal tendencies very closely, while some behave very erratically, even counter to their usual seasonal tendencies.  Use this link to learn—immediately!—how reliably your selected market(s) have behaved over the last few months.

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Time & Timing: Blazingly Fast, Amazingly Useful

Time & Timing is a set of carefully compiled databases of historical information about futures markets’ price movements that will 1) help you locate highly effective trading ideas, and 2) save you huge amounts of time in doing so.

Time & Timing is the original no-lose proposition — try it out before you subscribe. You will be surprised, perhaps even amazed, at just how useful it is in your research and trading. Try it absolutely free: go to The T&T WebApp now and sign up for a 30-day trial.  And, unlike quite a lot of websites offering ‘’free trials’’, your free trial will give you access to all of T&T, the entire website, and all its powerful analytical tools, for all the markets we track.

More information about Time & Timing

It’s straightforward and pretty easy to collect vast amounts of price data on markets. However, raw data, while useful, isn’t nearly as valuable to the trader as data that is organized and collated in a trading-oriented manner and for the distinct purpose of locating trading opportunities.

That’s what Time & Timing offers: the only affordable futures price history databases on the planet organized and designed to let you select and and analyze historical, seasonal, and short-term price tendencies in the futures markets fast, according to your interests, over any period(s) of the year, and in great detail.

T&T lets you look at (almost) everything — fast!

We regularly examine billions (literally!) of historical and seasonal trading ideas, over the last nine months of the lives of futures contracts in every major North American market and numerous European markets.  Our historical records go back to the 1970s and 1980s (after all, there weren’t any energy futures in the 1970s, right?), and you can analyze older market data just as easily as you can analyze this year’s data if you find it useful to do so.

Straight futures trades? Of course. This is the heart of T&T.

Spreads?  We examine the most popularly spread markets, beans, corn, wheat, cattle, hogs, energies. Not to mention lots of inter-market spreads, too: cattle vs hogs, gold vs silver, beans vs corn, corn vs oats, all the wheat spreads (well, except Winnipeg).

Currency crosses? Sure, for all the major currencies.  Be sure to try out the ‘SpreadMaster’ feature of T&T to see these in fine detail. The BTU spread in Crude vs Natural Gas, too.  And Crude vs each product. Heat vs Unleaded. Notes vs Bonds, 10s vs 5s, Fats vs Feeders. And, we’re adding other intermarket spreads frequently. If you don’t see your favorite intermarket spread, just let us know!

A huge collection of monthly stats, and much more

How about studies of what occurs after large, fast market moves? Is it advantageous to trade along with the move, or to fade it, or is this a matter of which market(s) made the move?  The only way to know the answers here is to look at the data, right? So, we do look, and we make the results available to you with just a few clicks. Also, we absolutely welcome your ideas for looking at historical tendencies, short- or long-term, that we haven’t yet examined.

Other studies?  Certainly. A vast collection of monthly stats on all the markets. Average movement, patterns of new contract highs and lows, days that move 1, 2, or 3 per cent or more, white and black candlesticks, you name it.

How about studies of just which moving averages have the highest predictive value in your favorite market(s)?  Yes, indeed — and, some textbooks and ‘gurus’ notwithstanding, T&T has found that the most effective number(s) of days to use for a moving average varies widely from market to market.

Better still, in many of T&T’s studies, you can tell T&T to find values for the parameters in your studies that historically have optimized trading results in your selected market(s). 

Only the very best historical trading possibilities

None of this discussion is either hype or puffery, period. We have culled out, from about 1.5 billion seasonal and short-date trading ideas, the very best historically valid and reliable trading possibilities there are. Don’t believe it? The proof is in the looking, so take a look at The T&T WebApp and see for yourself, by all means!

Even more importantly from your standpoint, we update all the databases regularly, daily in most cases, every 90 days for the futures and spreads seasonal studies. And, we’re constantly adding more markets and types of analyses that our subscribers want.

What’s our track record?  We don’t have one, and that’s deliberate.

Time & Timing isn’t about telling anyone what to trade or how to trade it. It’s about letting you, the trader, the analyst, the broker, get your hands on an enormous amount of accurately collated and organized data that will help you trade in your preferred markets, likely even more successfully than you are today. Just go to The T&T WebApp, do the quick signup (very short) and use T&T as you like for a full month. 

Time & Timing: Data & tools for more profitable futures trading

Welcome, and thanks for visiting!  It’s our job to provide you with absolutely top-quality historical information about the futures markets, and with a very good collection of tools to analyze their histories and locate profitable trading opportunities.  Also, it’s our job to save you a lot of time in your research and analysis, because your time is the only commodity for which demand always exceeds supply, right?  T&T does both jobs very well, as you’ll see.

Time & Timing is an innovative, blazingly fast, and easy-to-use set of databases that can be analyzed in numerous ways, and we’re adding more analysis features all the time.  Now, you can find all this data, and these tools and more at several other sites — if you don’t mind paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month to use them. However, there is nothing like Time & Timing for speed, ease of use, affordability (exactly 1 dollar per day for a year’s subscription, ridiculously inexpensive), and vast amounts of historical and seasonal information and analysis

Certainly, you shouldn’t take our word for all this.  Why not see for yourself, completely free of charge?

Right now, this minute, just go to The T&T WebApp, take 30 seconds for a very short signup, then help yourself to T&T’s wealth of data and analysis tools for futures and spreads—absolutely free for a month.  Your free trial gives you the use of the entire T&T website, too, not just certain parts of it as other websites do.

More about Time & Timing

Anyone can collect huge databases of historical market prices and offer them for sale. A number of companies do just this.  Raw data, though, while useful, isn’t nearly as valuable to the trader as data that’s been carefully organized and collated for traders, and for the distinct purpose of locating trading opportunities.

Time & Timing is the only affordable set of futures price history databases on the planet, organized and designed to let you select and view historical and seasonal price tendencies in the futures markets fast, according to your interests, at any time of the year, and in great detail.

Highlights:

We have culled the very best historically valid and reliable 2/1000ths of one percent of almost all trading possibilities there are. Hard to believe? Take a look at The T&T WebApp and see for yourself!

Time & Timing is about letting you, the trader, the analyst, the broker, get your hands on an enormous amount of accurately collated and organized data that will help you trade in your favorite markets.

Please be our guest and try out Time & Timing for free. Go ahead, kick the tires!  It costs you nothing except 30 seconds for a quick signup.

Best wishes and good trading to you!

—Stu