Man-buns and beards – leading market indicators – 

Portrait of August Rodin by John Singer Sargent 1884

The Dow Transport (DJT) is often a leading market indicator of where the stock market is headed. It consists of 20 top rated railroad, airline, trucking and delivery company stocks – think FedEx, Delta, Union Pacific. When the Dow Transport goes up, stocks go up and when it tanks, well, you get the picture. Right now the Dow Transport is sinking faster than the Titanic. It’s been dropping since December 2014, and is now down over 10% just this week. That’s really all you need to know when you’re pondering whether the stock market will go lower this fall. We’re in for a rocky road come September.  

Portrait of Claude Monet by Sargent 1887

 But, let’s take a look at a more interesting, and more accurate leading market indicator. Take the man-bun and beard phenomena that is omni present on the streets of NYC. Just walk into a Starbucks or look around the gym floor and you’ll see hipster men sporting “epic” beards of grizzly bear proportions. Top that off with the more feminine man-bun, an attempt at growing out a shoulder length mane of hair, and basically you’ve got a cross-gendered market indicator that foretells the end of this bull market. 

This revelation came to me yesterday after I strolled through the John Singer Sargent exhibit, Portraits of Friends and Artists, at The Met Museum. The show is chock full of Sargent’s best known paintings like, of course, Madame X. But, it also shows lush man-paintings like his portraits of artist friends including Rodin, Monet, Matisse, Renoir., etc. He was “hanging out” with all the boys of the impressionist movement. 

Self Portrait John Singer Sargent 1886

Let’s not ponder what they were doing right now – that’s a question for another post and another, more astute, homo blog. Just note that the exhibit is chock full of gorgeous paintings of gilded age decadence, like society ladies in pretty dresses and the bearded men that financed them. 

On the train, making my way home, the idea of the beard-bun as a market indicator hit me in the face. Standing next to me was a rather attractive thirtyish man with a perfectly groomed beard and a man-bun as delicious as a Mister Softer ice cream cone – make mine chocolate! He was dressed in a well tailored navy and chalk pinstriped suit, his naked ankles peaked out from his wingtips just begging to be adored, in his ears were sparkly diamond studs, on his wrist a gold Piaget watch the size of a Mack truck and dangling from his fist a brand new suit in a matte black Canali garment bag. As I took in the vision, my mind wondered back to the Met and all the lush Sargent man-boy paintings. On the small tv monitor the news of the day scrolled. The stock market ended the day down another 200 points. There it was, the idea that the market is approaching a mega melt down, like a speeding subway train, popped into my head. Then Mister Softee turned to me, smiled, exited the train and vanished into NYC’s rush hour. 

I thought it was odd and a bit surreal – but, my mind often  proposes the strangest things. Is the market in for a crash? Is the economy going to tank? We’ll have to wait and see.  But. one thing is for sure, we won’t see men in beards and man-buns a year from now.  Truth.

* The Gilded Age in US history is the late 19th century, from the 1870’s to about 1900. The term was coined by writer Mark Twain in The Gilded Age – A Tale of Today (1873), which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding.