The Best-Selling Book of All Time, and Two Patterns I'd Never Seen Before

I was reading the best-selling book of all time when I found two things I'd never seen before.

The book is the Bible. And what struck me wasn't a new verse — it was a pattern sitting inside two old stories I'd read plenty of times without catching what they were actually about. Both of them are about the same thing we do for a living: reading the record closely enough that you recognize what's coming before it arrives, and acting on it while everyone else is still waiting for permission.

The first is the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She'd spent everything she had on physicians and only gotten worse. When she heard Jesus was passing through, she didn't reach for him at random. She reached for the corner of his garment — the fringe on the edge — and the moment she touched it, she was healed.

Here's the part I'd never really sat with. She knew where to reach. The old prophecy — Malachi 4:2 — spoke of the sun of righteousness rising "with healing in his wings," and the Hebrew word for wing is the same word for the corner of a garment, where the fringe was tied. She had read the context. So when the moment came, she didn't just want to touch him hoping to get lucky. She went straight to the specific place the text had already told her the healing would be. The pattern was in the record for anyone who'd studied it. She'd studied it.

The second is the three young men — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — who wouldn't bow to the king's idol and got thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual for it. What gets me is how they stood before it ever happened. They already knew the promise, because they'd read Isaiah: when you walk through the fire you will not be burned, and the flame will not consume you — Isaiah 43:2. And here's the detail I can't get past: Isaiah wrote that roughly a hundred years before those three ever stood in front of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. The word had been sitting in the record for a century, waiting for the men who'd studied it closely enough to stand on it. That's exactly what they did — they stood on that word with the furnace door open in front of them. Everyone around them was bowing. They held. And they held because they'd studied the text — the conviction came before the miracle, not after.

Two stories. Two different disciplines. One knew exactly where to reach. The others knew to hold their ground while everyone else yielded. Both moved on what the record had already told them, before the outcome was visible to anyone watching.

That's the whole job.

History doesn't repeat itself cleanly in this business — but it rhymes, and the operator who's read the seasonal record recognizes the rhyme while everyone else is still waiting for confirmation. We don't read scripture to run a plant. We read the market's own history: decades of what ribs and tenders and the cutout have actually done, season after season, written down in the data. Read enough of it and the relationships start to speak. A price ratio — a rib primal measured against the cutout, a tender against its own historical base — is exactly that kind of text. It's a relationship written across years of market history. Let me be careful here, though — the woman was acting on the word of God, and a market call is a far humbler thing than that. I won't pretend the two are the same. But the discipline rhymes: study the record closely enough and it tells you where to act in the moment in front of you.

Which brings me to the setup I'm watching right now.

Holiday demand for ribs and tenders is loading up as we head toward year-end, and this season has a fork in the road. There are two distinct paths, and they lead to very different decisions.

**Path one is the early peak.** The run-up starts in September on a lighter kill and a scarcity mindset — and here's the variable that has genuinely rewritten this season: Suspend Fresh. The ability to position ribs early and hold them fresh has moved the curve of the holiday rib season. For years the record said the high came late. Suspend Fresh pulled it forward. It's a powerful tool, and if you're not accounting for it, you're reading last decade's pattern instead of this year's. When that early positioning dominates, the market tops out early: the first or second week of September becomes the high. From there it lags and retraces through October, with one smaller rally into November. But the peak is already behind you by the time most of the trade thinks it's coming.

**Path two is the traditional grind.** The run-up starts in September and just keeps building — through October, through November, all the way into December. In this path the high doesn't come early; it comes on the Wednesday of the first week of December, the way it has in the record for years. Tenders follow the same road as ribs.

Same starting month. Two completely different peaks. So how do you know which one you're on?

You read the ratio.

You watch ribs and tenders against where they were a year ago in September. If they run above last year's numbers for the month, the peak is in — expect the retracement in October and the smaller rally into November. If they stay suppressed under a year ago through September, the rally is still in front of you, and it runs all the way to the first week of December. Tenders confirm ribs. That's the tell, and it's readable in real time — you don't have to guess the fork, you watch which pattern is confirming.

This is exactly why we don't force one ratio and pray on it. We run multiple ratio concepts against the historical relationship precisely so you can examine several lenses and identify which historical pattern is actually holding this year. Path one and path two aren't a coin flip — each one is a different historical ratio, and the job is to see which is confirming while it's still forming. And the predictive ratio does what the woman did: it takes the market's own prior history, applies it to today's current conditions — including the ones, like Suspend Fresh, that have bent the old calendar — and tells you what the record says comes next.

So here's the question the season is going to put to you.

When the run-up comes and everyone around you is yielding to the received market — bowing to whatever the loudest voice says the price should be — will you hold your conviction? Or will you already know exactly where to reach, the way the woman knew the precise place to lay her hand?

The point of reading the record was never to predict the future outright. It's to recognize the pattern while it's still forming, and to move with certainty while everyone else is still waiting for it to be obvious. That's the whole of what we built ClearCut to give you: the history to hold your ground, and the ratio to know where to reach.

If you want to see the actual point-price forecast for ribs and tenders through the holiday period — the real numbers, not the thesis — start a 14-day trial and see them for yourself.

Carpe Diem,

Cody

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*Sources: the account of the woman healed appears in Mark 5; the prophecy she stood on is Malachi 4:2, where "healing in his wings" turns on the Hebrew word for wing also meaning the corner/hem of a garment. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego appear in Daniel 3; the promise they stood on is Isaiah 43:2. Rib and tenderloin primal history referenced from USDA AMS Mandatory Price Reporting.