Joshua Roberts
speaker
171 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 27 Jul
Joshua Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is a copy of the Financial Times.
Now, obviously, the headlines tell me news that's already happened.
But imagine if instead they were telling me tomorrow's news.
And I'm a trader.
I buy and sell stocks and bonds.
Rosie, how do you think I'm going to do?
Well, you might think so, but a couple of researchers have actually done an experiment that is very like this.
They invited 120 people to look at tomorrow's newspapers every day for 15 trading days and then place bets on stocks and bonds.
And the surprise is even with that crystal ball, they actually did pretty badly.
Yeah, some of the biggest events that move markets, as you said, they're data releases, things like jobs reports, where is unemployment, how many jobs have been added to the economy, how is inflation doing?
Are central banks going to move interest rates up or down?
These are the sorts of events that the participants in the experiment were shown in tomorrow's news.
If you know that the economy's added a lot of jobs, you might think the economy's growing quite quickly.
That will cheer shareholders, share prices are going to go up.
You might place a bet in advance that shares are going to go up.
Similarly, if you think the Federal Reserve is going to raise interest rates, you might think the bonds are going to do badly because bond prices tend to fall when interest rates go up.
However, even with that information, which you might think was the key that would unlock markets for you, yes, the participants didn't do particularly well in placing their trades.
So, yeah, obviously we we don't actually have access to tomorrow's headlines.
This was a team of researchers at Elmwealth, which is an investment firm.
And what they did was they picked 15 front pages of the Wall Street Journal between 2008 and 2022.
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