When you look at the market day by day, it can easily feel like a constant barrage of news, price movements and emotional storms. Sometimes we need to take a step back.

When we look up and take a slightly longer perspective, we begin to see that the market often moves in larger, long-term cycles. Cycles that are fundamentally linked to the economy – and that we can use to better understand the landscape we navigate.

I have taken inspiration from Lennart Schön's research on economic cycles and applied them to financial markets.

But it's important to be honest from the start: cycle analysis is not an exact science. It contains subjective assessments and is mainly useful in the really long term.

This type of analysis does not affect our systematic strategies. Our strategies, for example, presented in the Weekly Report, are rule-driven regardless of what we believe about cycles or the future.

However, cycle analysis gives us a valuable helicopter perspective. It doesn't help us make every buy or sell decision, but it can be a support when we manage risk, which we sometimes do with discretionary decisions. So today we're going to zoom out, look up, and talk about what the really big moves in the market actually look like.