1. Understanding Social Mood

From watching CNBC or reading The Wall Street Journal, it would be easy to conclude that it is the economy or corporate earnings that move the market. On any given day you might hear that stocks rose on a better than expected employment figure, while on another day stocks’ fall is attributed to a drop in profitability at Research in Motion or some other company.

Something had to make the market go up or down, and there are plenty of confident pundits and journalists whose job it is every day to tell us just what that specific something was.

At the risk of alienating the entire financial media complex, that something had nothing to do with today’s corporate earnings or economic reports. Although they are interesting facts, what we typically attribute a market move to are much more likely to be effects rather than causes.