Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned +0.92% across the same tape.
54 desks completed all five charts.
Warehouse memberships were shrugging off the broader retail gloom all spring, pushing Costco to fresh highs while traditional department stores buckled. The rally stalled here, just days before Amazon bought Whole Foods and briefly convinced Wall Street that physical grocers were finished.
When the 2018 crypto mining boom went bust, Nvidia was left sitting on a mountain of unsold graphics cards, and a grim November update turned a steady autumn slide into a rout. Almost nobody watching that gaming glut unwind saw the artificial intelligence buildout coming, a second act that has sent the shares up 4294.7% since.
Threats to US government research budgets had the street worried that academic lab spending was drying up, even as Thermo Fisher kept buying up smaller diagnostics and equipment makers. The spring rally took a breather here, early in a long run of selling the picks and shovels for modern biotech.
Then still trading as WellPoint after the Anthem merger created America's largest health insurer, the company was riding a wave of managed-care consolidation as Wall Street bet on scale. After a steady spring climb, the rally simply paused here to catch its breath.
By the autumn of 2024, years of streaming losses had given way to the first real signs of profitability at Disney+, even as investors worried that post-pandemic theme park crowds were starting to thin out. The summer floor held and the recovery kept grinding higher as the market waited on the search for Bob Iger's successor.