Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact? (ft.com)
- Reference: 0180864122
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/26/1744240/which-piece-of-speculative-fiction-had-the-greatest-single-day-stock-market-impact
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/f12398a8-ef57-412f-ae40-67ef9b421bed
> You may contend that this is facile. We would agree. You might contend that the comparisons make no sense because it's possible to read a blog post during a single work shift, but it's tricker to complete a whole novel (or sneak out to watch a movie). We would contend: do you really think traders read? Let's begin.
The methodology -- tracking S&P 500 daily moves for post-1986 releases and DJIA moves for pre-1986 ones -- crowned The Matrix as the all-time leader, its March 1999 US debut coinciding with a 1.11% drop in the index. Citrini's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" came in a close second at -1.04%. On the positive end, the 2013 release of Her, a film about a man falling in love with an AI agent, coincided with the largest gain in the set at +1.66%.
[1] https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/26/1714241/the-ai-case-against-indian-it-ignores-what-indian-it-actually-does
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/f12398a8-ef57-412f-ae40-67ef9b421bed
2027 (Score:1)
Without a doubt it's the idiocy related to AI 2027 and the CEOs lies that it contained.
Speculative Fiction (Score:2)
Isn't most of the S&P500 just speculative fiction anyway?
The War of The Worlds (Score:4, Insightful)
The best candidate is almost certainly H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds — but not the novel itself.
The single biggest one-day market shock caused by speculative fiction came from the 1938 radio adaptation by Orson Welles broadcast on CBS.
On 30 October 1938, Welles presented the story as fake breaking news about a Martian invasion. Many listeners tuned in late and missed the disclaimer. Panic followed: people fled homes, jammed phone lines, and some businesses shut early.
Financial effect? Not a crash, but measurable disruption.
Newspapers and later economic analyses reported:
trading desks received waves of calls asking if New York was under attack
some investors attempted emergency sell orders
retail activity briefly froze in parts of the Northeast
next-day market commentary explicitly mentioned “radio panic”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average did not collapse, but historians consider it the clearest case where fiction directly interfered with real market behavior within hours.
Why this one stands out:
Science fiction normally influences markets slowly, by shaping expectations (AI, space travel, cyberpunk tech, etc.). The Welles broadcast instead created an instant perceived reality shock.
A strong runner-up, though less direct, is Neuromancer by William Gibson. It didn’t move markets in a day, but it helped inspire the cybersecurity and internet economy that later drove enormous tech valuations.
So the answer depends on definition:
Immediate, single-day behavioral impact War of the Worlds broadcast (1938).
Largest long-term capital impact inspired by fiction cyberpunk and AI literature reshaping entire sectors.
Speculative fiction rarely moves markets because it predicts the future. It moves them when people briefly believe the future has already arrived.
Including Donald Trump's speeches? (Score:3)
Because frankly,it is hard to describe them as anything but speculative fiction.
Raises hand (Score:5, Funny)
> Which Piece of Speculative Fiction Had the Greatest Single-Day Stock Market Impact?
Trump's State of the Union speech? :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Joking but not too far off. I think the prize goes to the days after "Liberation Day" in the US; when the cascade of world wide tariffs by the US on every country (and an uninhabited island or two) in the world was announced. Days later, there was an announcement that the tariffs would be paused. And a quick retraction a couple of hours later.
Stock prices jumped. Then came back down as the word about the hoax spread. The following Monday, Trump put out a tweet that it was a "great time to buy stocks!
Re: (Score:2)
> ... I think this wins the prize as the greatest impact of fiction (the hoax announcement) on the stock market in one day.
Nicely laid out. Picking just the greatest Trump fiction would be harder though. One strong contender would be "Foreign countries / companies pay the tariffs." and people "believing" this are (a) drinking way too much MAGA Kool-Aid and/or are (b) just intellectually lazy, as even a simple Google search or Wikipedia lookup would show it to be false and that they are a tax paid by domestic companies and people - thank you 6/9 of SCOTUS for getting this obvious one right.
See? This is the problem. (Score:3)
People are fuckin' stupid.
Premise of the story is flawed (Score:3)
Someone is assuming there is causation in stock prices. Just a matter of opinion without any causal connection to reality these days.
The original premise of the stock market made a certain amount of sense. So perhaps we should correlate stock market changes against historical fiction.
Go through all the genres until we find the one with the highest correlation!
Re: (Score:1)
> Someone is assuming there is causation in stock prices. Just a matter of opinion without any causal connection to reality these days.
> The original premise of the stock market made a certain amount of sense. So perhaps we should correlate stock market changes against historical fiction.
> Go through all the genres until we find the one with the highest correlation!
preach! we're really reaching here with 1 and 2 percent changes and calling the speculative fiction stories the causal reason for them. must be a slow news day...
Re: (Score:2)
Opinion is a causal connection to reality unless you're suggesting that everyone who buys or sells stocks is insane.
It makes sense that big fiction releases would affect the stock market. Someone makes a feel good blockbuster movie about something and things related to that something are likely to sell better. Vice versa for the converse.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, everyone fixated on this blog post, except that Friday had seen a increase with the Supreme Court ruling against Trump tariffs, and then over the weekend Trump doubled down on imposing tariffs, erasing the gains.
There's a *lot* going on that could by itself explain issues, plenty of room for false correlations.
Re: Premise of the story is flawed (Score:1)
> triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday
Seriously? That's something people track? "Worst single day drop in nearly two weeks"?
You know what that means? Three weeks prior there was a worse single day drop. How do I know this, because if there wasn't the line would have read:
"triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly three weeks on Monday"
What a stupid non-issue.
Re: Premise of the story is flawed (Score:1)
Welcome to the modern world
Re: (Score:2)
>> triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly two weeks on Monday
> Seriously? That's something people track? "Worst single day drop in nearly two weeks"?
> You know what that means? Three weeks prior there was a worse single day drop. How do I know this, because if there wasn't the line would have read:
> "triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly three weeks on Monday"
> What a stupid non-issue.
close, but not tight enough. The reason it's "nearly two weeks" is because it's not EVEN 2 weeks. So you don't even have to go to "three". And if it was a bit over they'd probably say "in over two weeks" before they got to "nearly three weeks"
And this is still less ridiculous than the ad hoc sports stats that commentators quote in the computer age. like idk... "most consecutive times on base on a Tuesday during away games". Most 3 pointers per minute played. etc. i wonder how many such qu
Re: Premise of the story is flawed (Score:2)
A lot of bloggers are writing articles like this to purposely poison AI results these days, so I no longer am able to tell if the premise in stories like this is flawed by accident or design.
For example, try asking an AI who the best tech bloggers at eating hotdogs are.