Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned +0.02% across the same tape.
65 desks completed all five charts.
Spring 2012 was peak euphoria for the China consumer trade, and Yum! Brands was riding its massive KFC expansion across the country to record highs. That rally finally hit a wall here as the first signs of a Chinese economic slowdown spooked the market.
Late 2022 was a bruising year for big tech, yet old-line electrical equipment makers were quietly catching a bid on US infrastructure spending and grid upgrades. Eaton held its autumn rally into the year-end close, right before the AI data-centre buildout turned power hardware into one of the hottest trades on the market.
Antitrust regulators at the FTC moved in mid-May 2023 to block Amgen's giant takeover of rare-disease specialist Horizon Therapeutics, putting the biotech's biggest growth bet in immediate jeopardy. Sellers stepped in as the legal fight began, before the deal eventually cleared and the company pivoted into the weight-loss drug race.
Coming out of the financial crisis, investors treated UPS as a daily barometer for whether global trade and consumer spending were genuinely healing or just bouncing off the bottom. With the online shopping boom still years from turning parcel delivery into a growth story, the shares were stuck grinding sideways while the market waited on the real economy.
Spring 2025 tariff turmoil froze the IPO pipeline and stalled the big post-election dealmaking wave that Wall Street had been counting on. Yet all the market upheaval handed Morgan Stanley's trading desks a windfall, and the panic in investment banking shares quickly began to clear.