<story><title>Nobody knows what&apos;s going on</title><url>https://www.raptitude.com/2024/06/nobody-knows-whats-going-on/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheAlchemist</author><text>A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it&amp;#x27;s them !), nobody knows why.&lt;p&gt;But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !&lt;p&gt;As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lextuto</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s a potentially relevant quote from &amp;quot;The Man Who Solved the Market&amp;quot; by Gregory Zuckerman[0].&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher. Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest, rather than Renaissance’s miscue. [...] “Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the market went up because of such and such—remember it’s all nonsense,” [Peter] Brown [CEO of Renaissance Technologies] later would say.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gregoryzuckerman.com&amp;#x2F;the-books&amp;#x2F;the-man-who-solved-the-market&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gregoryzuckerman.com&amp;#x2F;the-books&amp;#x2F;the-man-who-solve...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Nobody knows what&apos;s going on</title><url>https://www.raptitude.com/2024/06/nobody-knows-whats-going-on/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheAlchemist</author><text>A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it&amp;#x27;s them !), nobody knows why.&lt;p&gt;But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !&lt;p&gt;As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kjkjadksj</author><text>The day of stock reports are such crap its actually entertaining to read. Especially when the market whiplashes a couple minutes after the midday report and they need to come up with a narrative. Most of the moves could honestly be summed up with “it was noon so a bunch of hft cron jobs turned on right then and bought or sold” or “nice numbers ending in 0 or 5 have their own gravity pull”</text></comment>