Seasonality heat map

The seasonality heat map presents the returns of an instrument across several years as a colored table. Each row stands for a calendar year and each column for a month or a quarter. A cell is the greener the more positive the return of that period was, and the redder the more negative it was. This makes recurring patterns over the course of the year visible, such as a traditionally weak summer phase or a year-end rally. The view is available for securities, derived securities and currency pairs, provided a sufficiently long price history exists.

Info

The calculation is based on the closing prices of the historical price data. For each month the last available trading day is used; a quarterly or annual value is derived from the last monthly value of the respective period.

Activating this view

The seasonality heat map appears in the additional area, that is, in the same place as the end-of-day chart and the end-of-day data as a table. It is opened from the context menu of an instrument via the entry Seasonality and thereby replaces whichever view was previously shown in the additional area. As with the chart, the entry is available wherever a table contains one row per instrument, in practice mainly in the watchlist.

Settings

Three inputs above the table recalculate the heat map on every change.

  • Period: Choice between Monthly and Quarterly. The monthly display contains twelve columns, the quarterly one four.
  • Include dividends: When this option is selected, dividends and interest are included in the return. A distribution is attributed to the month or quarter of its ex-date. The option can only be selected when the instrument actually pays dividends or interest.
  • In main currency: This converts the returns into the client’s main currency. The option is not available for currency pairs, nor when the instrument is already held in the main currency.

As its last column the table shows the Annual return of the respective year. The footer reports three figures per column across all years: the Average, the Median and Positive %, that is, the share of years in which the period in question closed positively. Positive % in particular is one of the most meaningful figures of a seasonality analysis, as it shows how reliably a pattern has repeated over the years.

Coloring is instrument-specific

The coloring follows the distribution of the returns within the instrument under consideration: the strongest loss is shown fully red, the strongest gain fully green, and the remaining values lie in between. The annual-return column is colored independently, since annual values are naturally larger than monthly or quarterly ones. For this reason the colors are not comparable between different instruments – the same color represents different percentage values for a calm instrument and for a highly volatile one.

Warning

Price or total return

As mentioned in the glossary, a distinction must be made between distributing and accumulating ETFs, and between price and performance indices; the same applies to shares with or without dividends. By default the heat map is based on the plain closing prices. The Include dividends option lets you add the distributions to the return, as far as corresponding data is available for the instrument. The user should therefore always be aware of which kind of return is currently being viewed.

Info

Retrieving the price data for this view counts toward the daily quota of different instruments, see Daily quota for retrieving historical price data.