Why Everyday Weather Does Not Move Markets, and Where Rare Extremes Might

This paper tests one idea from the author’s research method: rare, extreme events give better

trading signals than frequent, everyday ones. Weather is the obvious everyday example, because it

changes daily and there is a great deal of it.

First we built a free, automatic dashboard that turns the weather forecast into electricity demand,

wind and solar output, gas burned in power plants, gas storage and crop stress, and checks itself

against what happened. It works for about a week, but it did not make money. A winter gas rule

that looked profitable in 2021-2023 made nothing in 2024-2026. Of 12,824 weather-and-price

pairs tested, the 614 that looked predictive early were no better than chance later, and the same

was true of about 630,000 trading rules. Even after allowing for the seasons, weather did no

better than chance.

Then we looked at the rare end: slow climate patterns such as El Niño, drought, ocean

temperatures, snow cover and sea ice. We tested 32 of them in four groups, one after another:

ocean and polar indices; observed extremes such as drought and hurricane energy; more Pacific

and Atlantic ocean patterns; and regional drought with snow, sea ice and global temperature.

Most apparent links faded after the first period, and many of the survivors were the same El Niño

signal repeated across overlapping indices, so there are far fewer independent findings than rows.

Inside the research method’s own selection rules, the idea held up: the rarer the condition, the

more the selected rows beat chance later, from 4 points below chance for ordinary conditions to

12 points above for the rarest. Without those rules the pattern disappeared, and a trading rule

built on the rarest rows lost about 1.4% a year.

So the conclusion is bounded. Frequent weather is noise for investing. The rare, extreme tail is a

candidate resting on a handful of episodes, not yet a result. A dashboard now turns the frozen

conditions into paper positions and records what they earn from 12 October 2026, so the future

will settle it.