Fate Of Turkey’s Stock Market Is In The Hands Of An Algo Named “The Dude”

I mean, didn’t you notice on the plane when you started talking, eventually I started reading the vomit bag? Didn’t that give you some sort of clue, like hey, maybe this guy is not enjoying it? You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that, that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. — Steve Martin as “Neal Page” in “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”

If you’re a producer of financial content for public consumption, anything goes during the trading week. Doesn’t matter how trivial the chart or how esoteric the point, people are looking for anything that might give them an edge.

On weekends, it’s an entirely different story. You’ve gotta pick and choose, because as my mentor once told me, “no one wants to read about deep finance on the weekends.”

So, as Steve Martin told John Candy, “you have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing.”

Well on Saturday afternoon, I found something that fits that description and happily, it’s directly related to the referendum in Turkey which, as I noted earlier Saturday, is without question the most important geopolitical event of the weekend barring some kind of mushroom cloud on the Korean Peninsula.

On Monday morning, the Bloomberg headline read as follows:

Borsa Istanbul Banks Index up 3.9% as of 12:33pm in Istanbul, most since Jan. 30; benchmark BorsaIstanbul 100 Index rises 1.8%.

Analysts rushed to explain the apparent anomaly as the Borsa Istanbul 30 Index (a gauge of Turkey’s biggest listed companies), jumped 2% – the biggest gain among 96 equity benchmarks tracked by Bloomberg.

The consensus: it was all about the referendum one way or another.

“While referendum is obviously a risk, in the short-term the market is more interested to see the referendum being out of the way and on the removal of uncertainty,” Ozgur Yasar Guyuldar, head of equity sales at Raiffeisen Centrobank AG in Vienna said.