Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned +0.18% across the same tape.
50 desks completed all five charts.
Higher interest rates were punishing property trusts and dividend payers across the board, turning American Tower's steady mobile mast business into a bond proxy nobody wanted to own when yields climbed. With the Federal Reserve still hiking into early 2023, every attempt at a bounce quickly ran out of buyers.
Still trading as United Technologies back then, the industrial conglomerate was weighing an exit from its Sikorsky helicopter business while a strong dollar and slowing Chinese construction dragged on its Otis elevator arm. Years before the Raytheon merger reshaped it into a pure aerospace and defence giant, the street treated the shares as an unwieldy collection of parts waiting to be broken up.
Futures exchanges live on volatility, so a calm market grinding to record highs with the Fed on hold looked like sleepy business for the world's biggest derivatives floor. Weeks later, the COVID crash arrived and set off a rush for hedges across CME Group's markets.
All summer the talk was that rival chatbots would eat Google Search and antitrust courts would force a breakup. The core advertising engine kept humming anyway, and Alphabet ran straight through the doubt.
Closing the Motorola handset deal just as Facebook's botched listing soured the market on tech, Google was fighting the fear that mobile screens would never pay as well as desktop search. Sellers were not done with it that week, even with Android already quietly taking over the world's phones.