It’s 2026 – Get Your Fat Hogs to Market!
If you thought the Austrian Business Cycle was an early 20th century mode of transportation and that Ray’s Big (Debt) Cycle sounds like a circus act then you clearly do not spend enough time listening to doom pod-casts and counting your gold krugerrands. Fear not, I spend enough time doing it so you don't have to!
Back in 1873 an Ohio farmer called Samuel Benner lost his farm in the great farm panic – and this led to him having a lot of time to think about the boom and bust cycles for commodities like corn and hogs. He wrote a book in 1875 with many pages devoted to the peak years for selling fat hogs in Cincinnati and precisely no pages devoted to mathematical formulas. From past observation alone he produced a chart that predicts panic years every 20 years and peak prices every decade or so. Projected through 2059 his chart called 1929, 1987 and 2008 dead-on but has been off a few years on others. Benner’s predictive chart seems to hold up as well as any of the mathematically deduced economic cycle theories and is frequently quoted these days still. According to Benner, 2026 is a year to sell all your fat hogs and all the corn in your silo.
Should we follow Benner’s advice and liquidate our stocks and sell our houses? Well for one thing he did not have tax to consider as the Office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue had been defunded in 1872. There is, nonetheless, a lot of chatter about peak asset values now. It seems Warren Buffet would rather look at his cash mountain than have it on the stock market and Ray Dalio is telling us our debt will eat us!
So should we be concerned? Perhaps thoughtful is the better word. Markets move in cycles because people do. Fear and exuberance take turns driving decision-making, and every generation convinces itself that “this time is different.” We are certainly in a moment where asset values feel elevated, headlines feel loud, and uncertainty feels fashionable. But uncertainty has always been part of wealth creation, and history also rewards those who recognize opportunity when it presents itself.
And that is precisely what I see today in real estate. The North Shore housing market continues to benefit from a dynamic that simple economic theories cannot fully capture: exceptional communities with chronically limited supply. Buyers are still competing for well-positioned homes, particularly in premier locations where inventory remains remarkably tight. We may not be in the early innings anymore, but this is still an extraordinarily advantageous moment for homeowners who have built equity over the past decade and are considering a move, a lifestyle shift, or the monetization of a mature real estate asset.
Benner’s cycle is not a crystal ball, nor should it be treated as one. It is simply one more entertaining reminder that markets, like life, tend to move in rhythms. After decades in this business, I have learned to trust both data and intuition, and right now both are pointing in the same direction: this is a very good time to sell. Not because the sky is falling, but because demand remains strong, inventory remains constrained, and many homeowners are sitting on extraordinary gains. Sometimes the best decisions are not made out of fear of what comes next, but appreciation for the rare window of opportunity that exists today.
