The market is not in a mood

Two traders in Souq Waqif are comparing a slow month. One says the market is sulking. The other says it is teaching them a lesson for raising prices in the winter. Both are half joking, and both will make decisions this week as if it were true.

Giving things a mind is one of the oldest tricks we have. Assuming that the people around us carry an inner voice like our own, with wants and grudges and plans, let our ancestors guess what others would do before they did it, and kept a great many quarrels from turning into fights. It is cheap, fast and usually right about people.

It does not stop at people. We give a temper to the sea, a will to a stubborn printer, a grudge to the car that refuses to start. Mostly that is harmless, even charming.

It becomes expensive when we point it at things that are not anyone. A market is countless separate choices made for countless separate reasons. So is a currency, a fashion that sweeps through a city, the traffic on a Thursday evening. These systems produce patterns that look deliberate, and nothing in them is deciding anything. Give them a personality and we end up with villains, plots and bargains that do not exist, and we miss the plain causes in front of us.

I do not think the answer is to drop the habit. It is too useful and too deep. The answer is to catch it while it is happening, and to say so.

The honest version of the trader's remark is a little awkward, which is why nobody says it. I know I am talking about the market as if it were a person, because that is how my head works. Is that helping us see this month clearly, or is it hiding what actually changed?

That one sentence turns a superstition back into a tool.