https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/fool-me-three-times-and-i-give-up/

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In the study, published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, researchers from the University of Michigan carried out three experiments to investigate whether shopping restored a sense of control in people to counter feelings of sadness. Shopping was up to 40 times more effective at giving people a sense of control, and they were three times less sad compared to those who only browsed.

The study was carried out at the same university that issues the monthly Consumer Sentiment Index

For years we’ve been fed the “shopping is an addiction” line. What a change of errr… sentiment.

Source: Say buy buy to the blues: Picking goods and paying for them really does banish sadness, says a study into retail therapy

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If you believe that major market moves happen in New York, then watch the weather there. I’ve paid attention to that on occasion, mainly in dark winter storms but it’s only useful for daytrading.

Wouldn’t this mean that in sunnier climates, say in California, people invest more conservatively?

Weather variables, and sunshine in particular, are found to be strongly correlated with financial variables. I consider self-reported happiness as a channel through which sunshine affects financial variables. I examine the influence of happiness on risk-taking behavior by instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, and I find that happy people appear to be more risk-averse in financial decisions, and accordingly choose safer investments.

Happy people take more time for making decisions and have more self-control. Happy people also expect to live longer and accordingly seem more concerned about the future than the present, and expect less in inflation.

Source: “Weather and Financial Risk-Taking: Is Happiness the Channel?” from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study on Economic Research, August, 2009

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As for the retail investor sentiment, it shifted far towards the bearish side, very fast.

That’s another contrary indicator.

I don’t want to be short here.

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In short – handling money (compared with handling paper) reduces stress from loneliness, as well as physical pain from hot water. Somehow it makes a lot of sense, but also seems crazy.

The threshold must be different for everyone, but as the saying goes “everyone has a price”.

In ‘The symbolic power of money: reminders of money alter social distress and physical pain’ published in the journal Psychological Science, Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister explored how money could reduce a person’s feeling of pain and also negate their need for social popularity.

Harriet de Wit, Faculty Member for f1000 Medicine, said: “This research extends our understanding of relationships between social pain and physical pain, and remarkably, shows how acquired symbolic value of money, perhaps because of associations with power or control, can influence responses to both emotional and physical pain.”

She also noted: “These findings have great importance for a social system such as ours that is characterized by wide disparities in financial wellbeing.”

Zhou, Vohs and Baumeister determined that interpersonal rejection and physical pain caused desire for money to increase. They said: “Money can possibly substitute for social acceptance in conferring the ability to obtain benefits from the social system. Moreover, past work has suggested that responses to physical pain and social distress share common underlying mechanisms.”

“Handling money (compared with handling paper) reduced distress over social exclusion and diminished the physical pain of immersion in hot water. Being reminded of having spent money, however, intensified both social distress and physical pain,” the authors said.

More information: The full text of the evaluation of “The Symbolic Power of Money: Reminders of Money Alter Social Distress and Physical Pain” is available free for 90 days at http://www.f1000medicine.com/article/r2111rwty080l4q/id/1163818 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02353.x

Source: Faculty of 1000: Biology and Medicine

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One day I saw in the Paris Herald a dispatch from New York that Smelters had declared an extra dividend. They had run up the price of the stock and the entire market had come back quite strong. Of course that changed everything for me in Aix. The news simply meant that the bull cliques were still fighting desperately against conditions – against common sense and against common honesty, for they knew what was coming and were resorting to such schemes to put up the market in order to unload stocks before the storm struck them. It is possible they really did not believe the danger was as serious or as close at hand as I thought. The big men of the Street are as prone to be wishful thinkers as the politicians or the plain suckers. I myself can’t work that way. In a speculator such an attitude is fatal. Perhaps a manufacturer of securities or a promoter of new enterprises can afford to indulge in hope-jags.

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“Anyone with average intelligence can learn to trade. This is not rocket science. However, it’s much easier to learn what you should do in trading than to do it. Good systems tend to violate normal human tendencies. Of the people who can learn the basics, only a small percentage will be successful traders.

If a betting game among a certain number of participants is played long enough, eventually one player will have all the money. If there is any skill involved, it will accelerate the process of concentrating all the stakes in a few hands. Something like this happens in the market. There is a persistent overall tendency for equity to flow from the many to the few. In the long run, the majority loses. The implication for the trader is that to win you have to act like the minority. If you bring normal human habits and tendencies to trading, you’ll gravitate toward the majority and inevitably lose.”

William Eckhardt, from The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders

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Still quite a few “Great Depression charts” visitors but a lot fewer than in winter/early spring.

Of course, working with a very small sample here, but I’ll still be watching keywords for sentiment changes.

And here’s what’s going on with the “Great Depression” searches according to Google Trends. Looks like we’re entering a seasonal GD lull

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