During a recent trip to Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, Michael Najjar photographed a number of mountain ranges, and later realised their shapes bore a resemblance to a number of sharemarket indices from the last 20 to 30 years.

Here’s one way of making money through the sharemarket without actually investing in any stocks, bet on what the value of ASX index will be at the end of each month.

From today Australians can place a bet on where the S&P/ASX 200, the index of the nation’s 200 biggest listed companies, will finish at the end of the month. Centrebet’s bourse book shows that so far, most punters expect the market will rise in March. There are longer odds on a fall or steady result.

Apparently many share investors are very superstitious, and tend to refrain from buying shares, and making other investment decisions, on days when there is an eclipse.

Using four broad indices of the U.S. stock market, we uncover strong evidence in support of our superstition hypothesis in four distinct ways. First, the occurrence of negative superstitious events (i.e. eclipses) is associated with below-average stock returns, which is consistent with a diminished buying pressure coming from the superstitious.

So… as I see it, buying shares or stocks on the day of an eclipse might be a good idea as you could be buying at a lower price, which you can later sell at profit once the superstitious investors have returned to the market and buoyed it back up again.

Via Marginal Revolution.