Talk:Mark Twain effect

Post-hoc attribution
This article corrently says "The fact that Twain specifically picks out October initially is taken as a reference to an "October effect", as exemplified by the 1929, 1987 and 2008 stock market crashes which roughly occurred in October." This is unlikely absent time travel. Twain died in 1910 which is 19 years before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Also, this effect is attributed to mutual funds fiscal years ending in October and the first mutual fund was established in 1924, fourteen years after Twain's death.

Furthermore, this appears to be more commonly called the October Effect then the Mark Twain Effect. A google search for ["october effect" stock market] produces 28 times as many hits as ["mark twain effect" stock market]. I think the article should be renamed to October Effect.

Here's the history of this sentence.
 * The sentence 'Some have [incorrectly] taken this as a reference to an "October effect".' was added on 22 Decenber 2014 by an anonymous editor.
 * That editor then changed this to 'The fact that Twain specifically picks out October initially is [incorrectly] taken as a reference...'
 * Another anonymous editor changed this to '[most likely incorrectly]'.
 * Finally, user Alextejthompson removed '[most likely incorrectly]' as OR.

In fact, the entire sentence is OR. The original sentence that some people incorrectly credit Twain for referencing the October effect is probably true now if it wasn't before due to the Wikipedia effect.

---Vroo (talk) 21:36, 4 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Since no one replied to this after ~7 weeks, I've gone ahead and changed the content to fix this. While the "October effect" is the more common name, I did not rename the article at this point since most of the content is talking about Twain. If the article is expanded to include more discussion of the October effect in general, it should be renamed at that point.  ---Vroo (talk) 23:17, 24 November 2023 (UTC)