Joshua Roberts

speaker

181 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Aug

Joshua Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Cockroaches 1, Modi 0: India’s remarkable protests · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

And what they did was they picked...

15 front pages of the Wall Street Journal between 2008 and 2022.

And they recruited some participants and they showed each participant for each of 15 trading days tomorrow's headline.

Then what you get to do is buy or sell stocks.

You can buy or sell bonds.

And they gave each participant leverage to do this with.

So you could multiply your bet by up to 50 times.

This is the sort of bet that hedge funds actually get to place in real life.

At the end of the trading day, based on the actual market moves from that historical trading day, your trade gets closed out.

And we do that 50 times.

Now, each participant was given $50 to start with.

And you might think that they made loads and loads of money.

But actually...

Only about half of them ended up with more money than they started.

One in six went completely bust.

They lost everything.

And the average return was very small.

The average person ended up finishing with about $51.

So despite the crystal ball, they didn't do great.

One of the things is that even with tomorrow's news, it's surprisingly hard to guess the direction markets are going to move in.

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