The Blonde Correction

We usually ignore most of the submissions to radar by PR agencies, but this one caught my eye. Chris Macowski wrote in:

On Thursday, February 22 (two trading days before the market drop), CNBC anchor Dylan Ratigan led his show Fast Money (8:00 pm ET) by predicting the market was due for a big drop, as a result of the so called "Blonde Correction," citing traders' obsession with Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears.

"If people have time to worry about this we are in trouble," Ratigan said to lead his show. Ratigan went on to cite a raft of complacency statistics, including the longest streak of consecutive up months in the U.S. stock market since 1953.

Ratigan's traders scoffed at the blonde correction theory - in fact, Jeff Macke called him a "whiner", but only two trading days after Ratigan's blonde-based prediction on Fast Money, the US stock market fell more than 400 points on February 27, its worst day since 9/11!"

Here's a link to a page with the video of Ratigan's "Blonde Correction" segment.

What I found interesting about this is how much it tells us about faint signals and how the mind sees patterns. What we call intuition is often something we recognize but don't quite have a conscious story for. Rattigan seems to me to have picked up on the "blonde" connection mostly as a good headline for his show segment, but he had a real point to make. In fact, we all look for hooks on which to hang things that we know, but can't prove. (That explains, I think, the enduring popularity of astrology and other oracles among people who ought to know better: their "predictions" are so broad and ambiguous that they become like a mirror in which we can see (and say) something that we know by other means.)

And how right he is about there being trouble ahead for a culture that cares more about Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears than about Iraq or the economy.