Five anonymised historical charts were dealt to every player. The Monkey Index returned -0.44% across the same tape.
38 desks completed all five charts.
A late-summer yield-curve inversion and Federal Reserve rate cuts had convinced the street that shrinking lending margins would choke the big banks. Instead, receding trade-war fears and steady consumer borrowing carried JPMorgan Chase into record territory, where the rally paused to catch its breath.
Hauliers had spent the financial crisis nursing ageing fleets, and by that summer Wall Street still could not decide whether the freight recovery had real legs or was stalling into a second downturn. That hesitation kept the maker of Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks treading water right before pent-up demand for new rigs finally broke loose.
Hospitals that had frozen big equipment budgets after the financial crisis were ordering da Vinci surgical robots again, even while sceptics argued the machines were too expensive for routine operations. Every installed system locked in years of replacement instrument sales for Intuitive Surgical, and the shares are up 1158.2% since as robotic surgery became standard in the operating theatre.
A global commodities and infrastructure boom had lifted every heavy industrial name that spring, before a sudden May inflation scare knocked the whole trade back. At the time the market still priced Eaton as an old-line hydraulics and lorry-parts business, years before grid upgrades and data-centre power remade the company.
Life insurers like Prudential need higher bond yields to make their pension and annuity books pay, and stubbornly low inflation spent the summer of 2017 dragging those yields back down. Buyers stepped in once the summer drift looked overdone.