Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned +0.02% across the same tape.
52 desks completed all five charts.
As lockdowns eased in spring 2021, Wall Street wondered whether the pandemic shopping boom had already peaked, keeping Amazon stuck in a long sideways range while Jeff Bezos prepared to step down as chief executive. Buyers still pushed the shares back towards the top of that range ahead of the handover.
Years of talk about stretched household budgets had bears waiting for everyday card spending to crack, yet cross-border travel and checkout volumes refused to slow down. While the wider market wobbled into the new year, investors treated Mastercard as a steady toll booth on global commerce and kept bidding the trend higher.
Late 2014's oil crash caught Ecolab in the crossfire, as traders dumped the steady cleaning giant over its big push into oilfield chemicals. With crude in freefall after OPEC refused to cut output, the selling had further to run.
The new US medical-device excise tax took effect in January 2013, and Wall Street had spent the autumn worrying it would squeeze margins across the orthopaedic sector. Buyers concluded an ageing population needing hip and knee replacements mattered more than the tax and kept bidding Stryker higher.
Refining margins had cooled off from their post-invasion boom, leaving traditional fuel makers out of favour even as activist investors pushed Phillips 66 to break itself up. That winter slump proved to be the floor before a 142.8% run.