Stock Market Reporting Explained

 

Stock market indicators go up and down, economies quiver and governments rise and fall, as journalists tell us what “the market” was feeling and why that made the numbers come out the way they did.

 

Since the New York Stock Exchange alone has 2,000-odd traders, not to mention those in other exchanges, many have been puzzled at how journalists take the emotional pulse of so many, or even a big sample. If an intrepid journalist talks to a different NYSE stock trader every two minutes for the entire trading day, that’s still a shade less than ten percent of those trading.

 

Which doesn’t even take into account all the other good folk who are busy buying and selling shares elsewhere.

 

Yet, one trusted source can report that there are “worries that the market may have moved too high, too quickly over the past two and a half months.” And another journalism leader can tell us that worries about the Brits and “…less positive economic signals from the United States dented investor hopes Thursday that the world’s largest economies will show much vigor in the near term.”

Still another maven says  “optimism about a global economic recovery was tempered,”  and warns that “The tone on Wall Street turned bleak…,”  plus “The gloom was exacerbated” at the news that Standard & Poor’s may cut the United Kingdom’s  rating because of debt levels.

A different oracle says that the Brit’s potentially downgraded “credit ratings stoked fears about the state of the global economy.”

These and other market journalists are clearly very closely in touch with the psyches of stock traders and other market players. They not only know what they’re feeling, but why.

And these traders feel a lot. Most of us over the age of 20 don’t lurch between optimism and gloom in the course of a week as we drive our dented hopes to get our fears stoked. Yet stock traders must be so in touch with their feelings that their feelings have filed class-action harassment suits.

 

But there’s an alternate explanation. Go watch a group of kindergarten kids at play. They talk constantly to each other, as they both direct and act out parts in their make-believe epics.

 

“I’m gonna be the sheriff, and Joey’s gonna be the bad guy,” Billy says, to which Susie adds “and I’m going to be sad that Joey’s bad, because he’s my boyfriend,” while Joey declaims “I’m not gonna be no girl’s boyfriend! Let’s play something else!”

 

Market journalists overhearing that exchange would write “Prospects were mixed today in spite of strong planning statements from two key players as a third of the action vowed to sit things out until the situation changed.”

 

And if the little kids continue their squabble until an adult intervenes and asks what this is all about, the little kids will all say “I dunno.”

 

Market journalists, alas, will not.

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