September 16, 2022
A friend noted that the Dow is down again.
My theory as to why the Dow is almost always down on Fridays: People need beer money for the weekend.
In 1997, I covered futures and options trading for a financial wire service. I covered the coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton, and orange juice markets in real time. I also covered weekly money-supply meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Traders would buy orange juice futures in the last five minutes of the trading day on Friday, so the price would close higher. They were hoping for a frost or a freeze to damage the orange crops over the weekend, further driving up the price. If there were no damage over the weekend, they would just sell it off and get their money back, causing a Monday-morning plunge in price. If there were damage, there would be a hard run-up in price, and the traders would grab a good pile of cash.
We reporters/writers weren't allowed to trade for ethical reasons ... and probably for legal reasons, too.
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