Study two · the folklore battery
The Almanac of Everything Else
Every way the world is said to move the market — the moon, the planets, eclipses and comets, groundhogs and cicadas, popes and quarterbacks, skyscrapers and shutdowns — re-tested from raw prices, 1928 to the present. Event calendars are rebuilt from first principles (astronomical ephemeris, the Umm al-Qura calendar, the tz database, the GFZ geomagnetic record). Each daily indicator faces a 2,000-draw circular-shift permutation test; the whole battery then passes through Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery correction. make it weird was the brief; almost everything is noise is the finding.
The sky over Wall Street tonight
Computed from the ephemeris on every rebuild. Decorative and, as far as we can measure, economically inert.
Forthcoming omens
☽The Sky ninety-eight years of markets vs. the heavens
ⅩⅢThe Calendar days of dread, windows of cheer
❋Beasts, Rites & Omens oracles with fur, shells and smoke
⚒The Works of Man stadiums, shutdowns, skyscrapers
☰The Full Ledger every number behind every verdict
The daily battery
Diff = event-day minus control-day mean return (bps/day); Ann annualizes it. p(perm) is the permutation p-value; q(FDR) is false-discovery-corrected. Click a header to sort.
A SURVIVES verdict means q<0.05 after correction; suggestive means raw permutation p<0.05 but not after correction; noise is everything else.
Annual rules & event rules
Tested against the market's base rate — it rose in 67% of years, so a rule must beat always guessing up, not a coin flip.
🝳The Untestables lovingly catalogued, honestly abandoned
Some famous indicators cannot be backtested honestly — the data never existed, died with a trade association, or was a joke from birth. They are preserved here as specimens.
Hemline Index 1926
Skirts up, stocks up. A century of retellings; no dataset has ever contained both hemlines and dates.
Lipstick Index 2001
Recessions sell lipstick — except 2008, when lipstick fell 7%, and 2020, when the index quietly became skincare.
Hot Waitress Index 2009
New York Magazine's contribution to macroeconomics. No register of waitress hotness exists, mercifully.
Necktie Indicator lore
Tie sales were said to rise with job anxiety. The US tie-makers' association disbanded in June 2008 — months before Lehman. The indicator died before the recession it existed to predict.
Boston Snow Indicator lore
A white Christmas in Boston means a green year on Wall Street. Traders note its initials.
SI Swimsuit Indicator 1978
American cover model, American gains — ~89% hit rate at peak fame. 2008: American model. S&P −38%.
The McRib Effect 2016
S&P +7 bps on days the McRib is available (p=0.19). Built and published as a parody of exactly this page.
Butter in Bangladesh 1995
R² = 0.99 against the S&P with cheese and sheep added. The undefeated world champion of spurious correlation, published as satire.
Sotheby's Stock n≈4
Auction manias marked the tops of 1989, 1999 and 2007. The series went private in 2019, taking the indicator with it.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars —
it is in our sample size.