When MRK has looked like this before, what happened next?
We compare MRK's last 90 days against 6,122 stocks across 21 years of daily history. Only genuinely correlated cousins contribute (correlation ≥ 0.3). Right now MRK is up 7% over its last 90 trading days.
The Answer
Out of 100 similar setups, these correlated stocks ended their next 90 days
“Direction is essentially a coin flip. What stands out is that even the typical winner went through a -13% drawdown inside the path.”
The Picture
Where did the matched stocks go next?
Bold ink line on the left is MRK's actual recent 90 days. Faded threads on the right are how each of the 100 correlated similar stocks moved over their next 90 days, aligned to today. The navy line is the median path.
Five Futures
The 100 paths cluster into five distinct shapes.
Averages hide that future patterns came in distinct flavors. We grouped the 100 paths into five archetypes by their actual shape.
Closest matches
Real stocks, real past patterns.
Context
Matches span a broad mix of regimes: 6 from 2005-2007, 1 from 2008-2009, 10 from 2010-2014, 32 from 2015-2018, 28 from 2019-2021, 23 from 2022-2025. The base rate reflects across-cycle history.
How this was built+
We take MRK's last 90 trading days of price changes and turn them into a normalized shape. Then for every stock in the universe (~6,100) and every 90-day window in their history going back to 2005, we measure how similar their pattern was to the current one.
Before keeping any match, we check whether the candidate stock actually moves with the query historically. If correlation is below 0.3, we drop it. We only learn from genuinely correlated cousins.
The top 100 closest matches power everything above. For each, we look at what happened over the next 90 days, the worst point inside that window, and which of five archetype shapes it belonged to.
Guardrails: $50M median daily dollar volume, no future leak, self-matches excluded in the last year.
For educational and research purposes only. The numbers above describe what happened historically when stocks traded in patterns similar to this one. They are not a prediction of what will happen next. Past performance does not indicate future results.