Is The Stock Market Astrology for Finance Bros?

This is a terrible meme for a number of reasons but I'm trying to looking at it from a systems thinking perspective.

Disclaimer: This is a fairly gendered-sounding piece. The term 'finance bros' is a meme, and a woman can certainly be a finance bro. The descriptions of women here relate only to a small? subsection of women on a specific online dating app.

"The stock market is astrology for finance bros." Hear me out folks, it's the 21st century. I'm on the dating apps – everyone's on them these days. It's part of being a young, single male in a malthusian metropolis. You're endlessly swiping, liking and typing through a monotonous haze. Honestly, it gets pretty harrowing after reading through your billionth (or what feels like your billionth) profile. Hinge has this feature called prompts. Prompts are basically interview-type questions that serve as conversation starters. You run into some prompts more often than others, and most are deeply uninteresting. But there's always that one prompt that's so offensively bland it makes you do a double take. The one that I kept running into is the dreaded pineapple on pizza debate, but that's a story for another day. What really caught my eye and inspired this piece is the prompt: "The stock market is astrology for finance bros." Initially, I thought, "What a dumb prompt. These non-finance minded women just don't get it." But it's a good mental exercise to see things from other perspectives. So, I sat on it, processed it for a while. Then, after having the prompt scrape against my eyes for the nth time, I started to entertain the idea. And you know what, I admit, It's got more merit to it than I first thought.

What are star signs and the stock market? If you boil them down, they're both lagging indicators of complex systems. In systems thinking, a system takes an input and produces an output. There are three key components: the elements, their interconnection, and the system's ultimate purpose. Then, once you nest a system within a system, it becomes a complex system. By that vague definition, both astrology and the stock market are complex systems. They may target wildly different demographics and have a ridiculously broad scope – one tries to understand the publicly held arm of business, while the other categorises people. Both are deeply complex and expansive in scope. The machinations of the financial system are so vast and intricate that no single person truly grasps it all. The ones who get a little closer than the rest of us are hailed as geniuses – Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers. Then there's astrology, seeking to clarify the nature of people based on astrological phenomena. Who's the Warren Buffett of star signs? Nostradmus? Mystic Meg?And how would we even measure their success? Would we measure it at all?

In systems thinking, we have this concept of stocks and flows. Stocks describe a store, like money in the bank, and flows describe the increase or decrease of an amount of stock over time. For public markets, it's the total value of shares in existence and the flow in and out of that pool, specifically the amount allocated to different businesses. Systems are interesting because they can have subsystems within them. In astrology, you could have the system of a specific star sign and how it relates to the time of year. Then how those star signs interact with each other, then astrocartography; etc. There’s a surprising amount of method and depth to the madness.

Human-made systems, which are most systems, are especially interesting because belief is what keeps them going. The stock market works because we believe it works. Human currency, another belief system, allows trade because we trust pieces of paper in a denominated currency will be worth something at a certain time in the future with government backing as a guarantee. Without trust, these systems don't function. Without believers, they cease to exist. With star signs, if enough people – and trust me, a lot do – believe in how they manifest in personalities, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If one person thinks a system works a certain way, they're either crazy or a genius, maybe a bit of both. But if enough people think the system works in that same way, that's just how the system is. Take the stock market's perpetual growth, an incredibly wild concept that society has a vested interest in maintaining. Or inflation – if we believe it's low, it stays low. One of the Central banks' main roles isn't just to adjust inflation, but to moderate inflation expectations, which then influences the actual rates.

In terms of star signs, if you believe Geminis are crazy, you'll be more attuned to their crazy traits. So here I am, new years eve, pondering on star signs and their relation to central banking. If the ultimate goal of these systems is to categorise and define, they both do a decent enough job. What defines a person, what defines a business, and what traits should I look out for? This can be a P/E ratio for a certain industry versus Sagittarius Risings born in Europe. I don't know; it just makes me laugh. I raise my cup to both the stock market and astrology. Two sides of the same coin. Writing this has been an admission – those Hinge gals were onto something. If enough people subscribe to a belief system, it starts to carry validity. And man… star signs are popular, especially among secular, liberal women.

To wrap this up, I even GPT'd my own star sign to see what a machine trained on a huge corpus of human writing would say.

The result was surprisingly on point. Although that’s probably due to the barnum effect - the phenomenon where broad, general statements seem personally relevant - more than anything. In the future, whenever I see this prompt on Hinge, I'm gonna have to smirk because those Hinge gals may not know it but they’ve inadvertently hit on a universal truth that rings just as true in the finance world. It’s not the greatest revelation but it bridges the gap between celestial whimsy and economic spreads, and underscores the power of belief in practice.