Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned -0.08% across the same tape.
41 desks completed all five charts.
Autumn 2018 had the street fretting that Federal Reserve rate hikes would finally cool the American shopper, and funds were trimming even steady payment networks like Visa. That late November bounce proved a false dawn right before the wider December rout took hold.
Summer 2015's China market rout had Wall Street convinced that Apple had hit peak iPhone after the giant iPhone 6 upgrade cycle. Traders spent September bracing for hardware growth to stall, right before the services business took over and sent the shares up 1261.8% from here.
With the trade war flaring up again in midsummer 2019, investors piled into steady compounders that sold boring essentials like industrial water treatment and restaurant soap. For Ecolab, the recurring-revenue hygiene pitch was a shelter from the tariff noise, months before a global pandemic made institutional sanitiser the centre of the market's attention.
Late 2012 was peak "death of the PC" gloom for chipmakers, even as the smartphone and cloud boom was quietly retooling the world's foundries. Lam Research spent this quarter climbing out of a cyclical trough for wafer-fab gear, right at the start of a decade-long run that has since taken the stock up +7033.3%.
Phone giants were rolling out fibre to attack the cable bundle and a cooling US housing market meant fewer new homes wiring up for television, so investors spent that summer marking Comcast down even as the wider market marched to a peak. The autumn pause here was only a breather before the credit crisis arrived in full.