Questions about Next Turn
Plain answers to the questions people ask most. Projections, not predictions: nothing here is investment advice.
What is Next Turn?
Next Turn applies signal processing to financial time series. Every night it measures the cycles inside each market's daily data, shows where each market stands in its cycle today, and projects its next turn, a peak or a trough, with a window of plus or minus some trading days.
What is a market cycle?
A cycle is a wave that keeps coming back in a market's price, after the long trend is taken away. A price is many such waves added together, plus noise. Next Turn keeps only the waves that stand out clearly from what noise alone would produce.
How does Next Turn find the cycles?
It removes the long trend, then scans the series with a wavelet: a short wave tried at every length and every point in time. Where it fits well, a bright band shows up in the scalogram, and each band becomes a smooth wave of its own length. Added together and extended past today, those waves give the projection.
Why wavelets and not Fourier (FFT)?
The Fourier transform (FFT) shows which cycle lengths a series contains, but averaged over all of its history. Markets change: a cycle can run for two years and then fade. A wavelet shows each cycle's strength over time as well, so you can see which cycles are alive today.
Is the next turn a prediction?
No. It is a projection: where the next peak or trough would fall if the measured rhythm holds. Cycles drift, fade and appear, and a projected turn can come early, late, or be overrun by a strong trend. That is why every projected turn has a window around it.
What does the plus-or-minus window mean?
It shows how early or late a projected turn has typically come, measured by replaying past turns. It is a share of the cycle's length, so a longer cycle gets a wider window. Turns further ahead get wider windows, and beyond the third they are estimated rather than measured.
→ Charts
Why does the projected date move?
Every night a new day of data arrives and the whole measurement is done again. Near today the wavelet can only see the past side, so the most recent stretch is provisional and settles as new days come in. A date that shifts a few days is the measurement updating, not a mistake.
How is this different from a seasonal chart?
A seasonal chart assumes a cycle of exactly one year that hits the same calendar dates every year. Next Turn measures how long each rhythm really is (78 trading days, 120, whatever the data shows) and where it stands today. The Seasonality page shows both side by side.
How is this different from Hurst cycle analysis?
Classic Hurst analysis works with nominal cycle lengths fixed in advance, such as 20 or 40 weeks, and fits the price to them. Next Turn does not fix any length: it measures which cycle lengths are in the data right now, and drops cycles that have faded.
Which markets are free?
Five markets are free, with full charts and no sign-up: the S&P 500 (SPY), gold (GLD), Nvidia (NVDA), S&P 500 realised volatility (built from SPY's daily prices, not the VIX) and gold vs silver. Premium covers all 113 US-listed markets we follow, plus the Markets, Calendar, Rhythms and Seasonality pages. Which markets are free, and which markets Premium covers, may change over time.
→ S&P 500 · Gold · Nvidia · S&P 500 volatility · Gold vs silver · Premium
How often is it updated?
Every night after the US market close, all markets are measured again from their daily data. Each page shows the date of the latest data it uses.
→ Charts
Is this investment advice?
No. Next Turn is a measurement of the rhythm inside past prices. It does not trade, gives no buy or sell signals, and nothing on the site is investment advice. Your decisions are your own.