4. Gambling, Money Spending, and Stock Returns
You know that feeling when you wake up and it’s unexpectedly very sunny and you have this feeling that you could accomplish something special today? Well, it seems that happens to a lot of people, and the more sunshine there is, the more they get into that Charlie Sheen winning mood – the results are actually very good but not for them but for the lotteries…
On sunny days, people spend more money on products they buy for pleasure, even if those things aren’t durable and won’t last for more than three years.
A study examined the relationship of morning sunshine at a country’s leading stock exchange to a market index stock returns on the same day at 26 stock exchanges internationally over the time span of 15 years and discovered that while snow and rain are unrelated to returns, the sunshine actually is strongly positively correlated! Scientists couldn’t find any satisfactory rational explanation as to why that is so. This is, without a doubt, the strangest fact on our list of the 7 ways weather affects human behavior and emotions.
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