What if someone in the 1800s had already cracked the code for predicting booms and busts in the economy?
That’s exactly what Samuel Benner tried to do when he published his now-famous Benner Cycle—a chart mapping out repeating cycles of prosperity, panic, and recovery.
The Benner Cycle attempts to forecast long-term trends in commodity prices and stock market behavior using a repeating pattern of years.
According to the cycle, bull markets tend to peak roughly every 8 to 10 years, while major panics show up in a 16 to 20-year rhythm.
Benner laid out this pattern in the 1870s, and incredibly, the cycle has proven eerily accurate through events like the 1929 crash, the 1987 drop, the 2000 dot-com bubble, and even the 2008 financial crisis.
Financial analyst Sergio Avedian recently revisited this topic in a fascinating YouTube video where he breaks down the Benner Cycle year-by-year and overlays it with modern market data.
His analysis shows that the chart—though old—continues to align with real-world market events more often than chance would suggest.
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