Folklore #251
Folklore & calendar
Two separate finance papers in the early 2000s reported that stock returns around the new moon beat returns around the full moon, across dozens of countries.
The proposed mechanism was mood, borrowed from the psychiatric literature that had already failed to hold up. The findings have been attacked as data mining — with enough markets and enough date windows something will be significant — and the effect has not survived out of sample. Worth knowing it was tested seriously, and worth knowing how it went.
Tradition: Dichev & Janes (2003); Yuan, Zheng & Zhu (2006); contested · checked Sep 2026