How Novelty and Narratives Drive the Stock Market

Book excerpt: "When unscheduled events hit the stock market, from corporate scandals and technological breakthroughs to recessions and pandemics, relationships driving returns change in unforeseeable ways. To deal with uncertainty, investors engage in narratives thatwhich simplify the complexity of real-time, non-routine change. Narratives themselves are a source of uncertainty as investors tell stories that others have told them and so on. This book assesses the Novelty-Narrative Hypothesis for the U.S. stock market by conducting a comprehensive investigation of unscheduled events through big data textual news analysis of Dow Jones and Bloomberg News financial reports. Analysis is motivated by great early thinkers of modern-day capital markets, such as Knight, Keynes, and Popper, and recent evidence from outside disciplines, such as cognitive psychology, sociology, and linguistics. Findings suggests that major macro events and associated narratives spill over into the churning stream of corporate novelty and sub-narratives, spawning different forms of unforeseeable stock market instability"--