'Jersey Shore' Index Pops After Opening Bell
By: The New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell ceremony is probably one of the most widely viewed daily televised events in the world.
Companies, foreign dignitaries and government officials use the opening bell to celebrate and call attention to important milestones.
Today, as you probably already know, visiting dignitaries from the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell. Officially, the excuse for this was that Viacom was honoring the start of the second season of the MTV reality television show this Thursday.
You might think that all the attention the opening bell gets would result in a significant boost to a company’s stock price.
Unfortunately, the academics tell us there is very little correlation between ringing the bell and share prices. It’s basically a non-event as far as individual stock prices are concerned.
But academics are boring and often wrong. They also tell us the market is so efficient that consistently profiting from trading individual stocks is all but impossible. This hasn’t stopped Wall Street from creating entire businesses built around the attempt to disprove efficient markets.
More importantly, the academics who did those studies probably never fist-pumped with JWoww, Snooki, The Situation or Pauli D.
The Village Voice decided to create a GTL index in honor of the Jersey Shore’s cast visit to the NYSE. (For strangers to the series: the characters describe going to the Gym, Tanning and doing Laundry as important parts of their daily lives.)
So how did the GTL Index do?
On a day when the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed more or less flat, the GTL stocks picked by the Observer outperformed the markets. In some cases dramatically. Let’s start with the G: the fitness product company Nautilus is up 7.91 percent for the day.
Energizer, which makes popular tanning products, is up 9.9 percent.
Even the giant consumer products company Procter & Gamble—the makers of Tide detergent—outperformed, with a rise of 0.9 percent.
If you bought the GTL Index yesterday, in anticipation of the Jersey Shore hitting the NYSE, you had a very good day. Get out there and start fist pumping.
