A Note From the Chairman: April 2026

Dr. Richard Smith, FSC Chairman

A Note from the Chairman: Cycles in the City '26

Dear FSC Friends,

This month, we gather.

Cycles in the City '26 takes place in May, and I want to tell you why I believe it may be the most significant event in the FSC's recent history – and why you should join us (there are a few seats left).

Let me start with something I've been sitting with for the past several months.

Spending time in the archives has changed how I think about cycles. Dewey and his colleagues studied cycles differently than we do today. They were not simply fitting curves to data. They were asking what cycles mean – why they recur, what connects them, what the patterns are patterns of. That is a different kind of question, and it requires a different kind of attention.

I've been chasing that question myself. Thinking about the tides – the way the lunar M2 and the solar S2 interact to produce the spring and neap tides – I began to see something I hadn't seen before. The individual cycles matter. But what matters more is the relationship between them. The phenomenon you observe isn't M2 or S2. It's what happens when they meet.

That seems obvious once you say it. And yet most cycle analysis treats cycles as independent signals to be isolated, identified, and stacked. What the tides teach is that the relationship is not incidental. The relationship is constitutive. Remove the interaction and you don't have a simpler version of the same thing – you have something categorically different.

I'm not going to develop that further here. But I will say that following that thread has led me somewhere unexpected – into questions about the mathematics that underlies cycles, and why the standard toolkit may be systematically leaving something out. There is a difference between algebra and geometry that turns out to matter enormously. Algebra without geometry is blind. And I believe that cycles research has been doing a great deal of very good algebra.

What I expect from Cycles in the City is the beginning of something more.

Look at what we have assembled: Michael Howell on the debt/liquidity cycle; Iain MacKay on tidal planets; Christopher Carolan on tides and calendars as the original seasonal clock; Janne Miettinen on population-wide hormonal oscillators and the Fourth Turning; And that just takes us through the first half of Day 1!

We also have Tom McClellan bringing insights from physics directly to market cycles. Harry Dent on cycles understood in hierarchies. Elliott Prechter, John Bollinger, Larry Williams, Jake Bernstein – names that represent decades and decades of serious empirical work.

These are not people who merely believe in cycles. These are people who have staked their professional reputations on them. Three days, twenty-plus speakers, an interactive roundtable each afternoon, a VIP dinner, and an evening reception. What happens when you put that much rigorous, convergent thinking in one room is difficult to predict precisely. But I have a strong intuition about the direction.

The veil gets lifted on something.

The FSC was founded in 1941 by people who saw that the structure of events was not random – that there was a pattern in how things unfold, and that it could be studied. They were right. What they perhaps could not have anticipated was how long it would take the rest of the world to catch up, or what tools would eventually be available to pursue those questions seriously.

We have those tools now. And we have each other.

There are only a few seats remaining. If you've been on the fence, it’s now or never. Click here to secure your spot.

I’ll see you there – and we’ll see new things together.

Dr. Richard Smith
Chairman of the Board and Executive Director