The cover curse strikes again

Bloomberg Opinion’s John Authers writes about the cover curse in financial journalism.

Authers writes, “So there’s no question that something very significant is afoot for the financial world. The question is whether we are getting over-excited or falling victim to the propensity toward extrapolating trends infinitely. Journalists know all about this, as it manifests itself in the so-called ‘Cover Curse’ — once a trend is so clear that magazine editors have put it on the cover, it tends already to have reached its zenith. A Businessweek cover from 1981 [TBN: actually 1979] proclaiming the ‘Death of Equities’ a few months before the beginning of the longest equity bull market in history is the most famous of the genre. But more recently, this is The Economist cover from late 2011, when the world economy was — with hindsight — beginning a recovery:

“And then there is this cover from my colleagues at Bloomberg Businessweek, from April 2019. The timing wasn’t perfect, but it certainly hasn’t aged well:

“So, have we in the media succumbed to journalistic over-excitement once more? Peter Atwater of Financial Insyghts LLC, who monitors market mood and kindly provided the magazine covers above, thinks the degree of absolute certainty in much coverage suggests a rebound is probably coming. This includes my own.”

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