#seasonality

#seasonality

Walk into any bakery in November and you can spot the season's sweetest rivalry. Golden apple pies face off against orange pumpkin pies, and every year the same question comes up: which one belongs on your table? The numbers The rivalry isn't just about flavor. It's baked into American tradition and backed by data. Grocery orders and surveys tell two different stories about which pie really wins, depending on whether you look at year-round sales or Thanksgiving favorites.

Broadly speaking, that's true. Across Manhattan and Brooklyn, deal activity tends to rise in the first half of the year, peaking in late spring, then cooling down after Memorial Day as the vacation season kicks in, ramping back up in September once the cool air returns. However, if you're basing your strategy, whether as a buyer or seller, on the overall market trend, you might be missing your moment.

Whole, unpeeled butternut squash typically last about three months, however, ensuring the longest shelf-life for your squash begins with knowing how to pick them. Always buy in season, from late summer through early winter (peak ripeness is from September through November). They should be hard all around - no mushy spots and free of any deep cuts or gashes (light scuffs are fine).

After the frenzy of the summer tourist season, towns along Cape Cod, much like oysters themselves, prepare for hibernation. Restaurants, inns, and seafood shacks shutter for the season. Children go back to school. Beaches and ponds become desolate. And the chill of October nights signals to the oysters resting on the seabed to fatten up. This is the beginning of the best months to eat oysters.

If you're wondering why your favorite fresh berries are so much more expensive than other options like apples and bananas, it's probably because you are thinking about fruit as plants, not commodities. Like it or not, our modern food infrastructure is full of complex structures to get oranges from California, tropical fruit, and potatoes from Idaho onto the same store shelves. And being a commodity means every little bump in that road ends with a little bump in price that you see at the grocery store.

Dubbed the " September Effect," this phenomenon sees the S&P 500 averaging a negative 0.8% return since 1926, the only month with a consistent negative average over nearly a century. Theories abound as to why: from portfolio rebalancing by institutional investors to tax-loss harvesting and post-vacation market jitters.

There are lots of ways to measure home prices. Repeat-sales indexes like the S&P Cotality Case Shiller are very effective at tracking changes in the value of homes, but are very slow and lag the actual market. Market-based measures like the Altos price or the Altos pending price are immediate and best to answer What do homes cost today? These measures move together generally but can have subtle differences in timing and noise.