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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Hysteria about futures

In the last few days, interest in S&P and Dow futures have spiked to the highest level in all time. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=Futures,Dow%20futures&hl=en

This seems to be diven by torrent of fake news articles that all suddenly want to talk about futures right now despite basically never mentioning them ever before. Example: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stock-futures-nikkei-225-s-p-500-nasdaq-dow-tariffs/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/02/business/us-stock-market/index.html https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-investors-braced-more-volatility-bumps-ahead-monday-trading-open-2025-04-06/

Now of course the explanation is obvious, they're doing it as a dig on trump. The fake news media was fishing for something to attack trump with, and every fake news journalist in the country just got their orders. And their psy op worked, because now all the normies are talking about it. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&geo=US&q=Futures,Dow%20futures,Crypto,Twitter&hl=en

We've had big market crashes before, but nobody really cared about stock futures. Any other explanation?

  • -16

Even after the market didn't 'plummet' and just went sideways monday & tuesday, some basic news aggregators like yahoo news (don't ask, I'm masochistic and want to see what is being pushed to normie boomers) kept that Reuters article about futures from sunday on the front page for days, just because the headline was so juicy for them as anti-trump fuel, and it seemed like it was applicable at any point in time. People have given some reasonable pushback and alternative explanations, but you're also not wrong here.

I forget who said it at the Reddit, but the first-term Trump advice of 'wait a week before forming a strong opinion about anything Trump does or is alleged to have done' remains sound advice. It typically takes a few days to separate the statements from the coverage from the actions, if any, that were being claimed / insinuated.

zoom out to all time. an even bigger spike occurred in 2020 during Covid . there is no psyop

If you look carefully it's actually higher right now. The problem is tmin the 5+ year view the current data is truncated, but if you compare to a 12 mo ago baseline right now is higher

This seems to be diven by torrent of fake news articles

Can you clarify what's fake about these news articles?

Their motivation.

Now of course the explanation is obvious

You’re right. The answer is obvious.

they're doing it as a dig on trump.

No, it’s because futures exchanges are open longer hours than stock exchanges. If you want to know what the market thinks of recent news that broke while the stock market was closed, you look at the futures market.

Futures markets are reported literally every day. I have no idea what this post on "psyops" is about.

N=1, but this is actually the first time I’ve seen “futures” mentioned in conjunction with tariffs. My parents, coworkers, etc. just talk about the collective “market” crashing.

I learned about them from a Terry Pratchett joke. Something about a pork futures warehouse.

Anyway, google trends doesn’t tell you anything useful. Interest in tariffs has spiked. So have terms like deficit and onshoring. Are these psyops, too?

No those aren't because those terms have have been mentioned and are in common use before March 2025.

Are we looking at the same graphs? Cause the spike in "tariffs" looks more extreme than any of the ones you showed.

Also, if you extend this one back to the beginning of 2020, rather than April 2020, there's a giant spike in both "futures" terms.

Um, because it didn't exist? The Dow futures index wasn't launched until 2015. The only big crash since then was the March 2020 crash, and people were definitely talking about the Dow Futures Index then, but with other things taking the spotlight, you probably weren't reading the business section. Now that the tariffs are THE story of the week, you're paying closer attention to what's being written about the markets.

Ok we have a winner here. This explanation sounds right, that futures are a new thing.

Equity index futures are not a new thing. The first S&P 500 index future was traded in 1982.

Financial professionals don't take the Dow particularly seriously as an index, and there were practical advantages to concentrating trading in a single US large-cap index, which is why Dow index futures were not traded until 2015.

I suspect the reason why there used to be less coverage of equity index futures markets in the non-specialist media is the development of the 24hr news cycle - it was only recently that a journalist (or citizen journalist) would need to report on equity markets when the stock exchange was closed.

I would add to this that uninformed order flow retail traders had much less access to derivatives in the past, whereas now, apps like Robinhood make them a breeze to enable and eagerly teach you how to use them.

Futures are therefore more broadly discussed.

I get a sensible chuckle every time I see how the retail trading apps have managed to turn the mandatory risk disclosures into a, “you must be at least this cool to trade options 😎, “ button.

It's important to understand the risks of stock ownership

Have you renewed your subscription?

Yeah, even Mammon is impressed

In the last 100 years? Definitely not. In 1925 bank deposits were uninsured, tariffs were common, and every major country had its own gold standard.

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