Hey Thoughty2 here.
There is a strange, unexplainable phenomenon that plagues the stock market.
It’s called the Ting Hai Effect.
There is a huge and very sudden drop in the stock market whenever a film or a television
series staring Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng is released.
If this is the strangest thing you’ve ever heard, you’re not alone.
It may seem crazy but it’s completely true.
The stock market is an enormous, global beast that constantly goes up or goes down.
Which direction it will go in the future is determined by millions of social, economic
and political factors.
Many of the world’s greatest mathematicians and analysts have spent years attempting to
accurately predict the stock market.
All have failed.
Sudden drops in the markets are usually caused by major news releases.
The release of a new film or TV show should have no impact whatsoever on the markets.
Yet, despite this, on 5th October 1992 the first episode of a TV series called the Greed
of Man staring Hong Kong actor Adam Cheng was aired on TV.
The Hang Seng Index, which measures the combined strength of Hong Kong’s stock market, fell
by 600 points.
And then, two years later Instinct made its TV debut, staring Adam Cheng; the Hand Seng
Index fell by over 2,000 points!
Three years later, Adam Cheng stars in Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, guess what… the
Hang Seng Index fell by 300 points.
This happened time and time again, over 25 years and many TV and film releases.
Every single time the stock market unexplainably dropped due to Adam Cheng’s appearance in
said shows.
This phenomenon has been speculated upon by stock brokers for decades.
No one has been able to explain the true cause but some investors argue that the first one
or two occurrences were genuine coincidences and it has since become a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
When a great number of people believe something to be true even if it isn’t, they can actually
make it happen through their subsequent actions.
Due to the so called “Ting Hai Effect” happening in the past, whenever a TV show
or film is now released staring Adam Cheng it becomes big news in Hong Kong, especially
amongst financial investors.
Because financial investors are expecting the stock market to drop upon the show’s
release, they could actually be fulfilling this prophecy and making it happen themselves,
through their investments.
A one-time coincidence has thus become a regularly occurring phenomenon, due to crowd psychology.
If you think a Chinese film-star buggering up the stock market is strange, you won’t
believe what I’m about to tell you.
This tale of coincidence is between two American presidents.
None other than Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
The timelines of their individual lives are so unbelievably similar to each other that
many people have a hard time believing it to be just a coincidence.
Firstly, Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946, precisely 100 years later.
Then Lincoln was elected President in 1860, JFK was elected President in 1960, again,
exactly 100 years apart.
Then both presidents and their wives lost their children whilst living in the White
House.
But it gets even weirder…
Both presidents were shot in the head and both were shot dead on a Friday.
Both men were shot in the back of the head and in the presence of their wives.
Lincoln was shot inside Ford’s Theatre and Kennedy was shot in a Lincoln car, made by
Ford.
When it comes to presidential coincidences there’s something very odd going on with
their hands.
10% of the global population are left handed.
But that figure is massively skewed when it comes to US presidents, 50% of the previous
twelve presidents were left handed.
That’s five times higher than the norm.
Although there may be more to this than pure coincidence.
Some scientists believe left-handed people are more capable of quicker and broader thinking.
This is backed up by the fact that a much higher percentage of historical geniuses,
Einstein, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, for example, were left handed, when compared
to the general population.
But there are some incredible stories of coincidences from history that have no logical explanation.
Bermuda, 1975, a man is riding a moped down the street when suddenly a taxi, carrying
a passenger, hits him at high speed.
He is killed instantly.
Exactly one year later the dead man’s brother is killed in the exact same way.
And when I say the exact same way, I mean he was driving the same moped, not a similar
moped, the exact same one.
He was struck down in the exact same spot by the same taxi driver and get this, the
taxi driver was even carrying the same passenger.
To top it off, the brothers were both 17 years old when they died.
That’s seriously spooky.
A man named Henry Ziegland knew all too well about coincidences.
In 1883 he broke up with his girlfriend.
She was so upset by this she committed suicide.
The girl’s brother was so angry that he hunted down Ziegland and shot him in the head.
The brother then immediately turned the gun on himself and took his own life.
Unaware to the deceased brother, his bullet had not actually killed Ziegland, it narrowly
missed, grazing his cheek and lodged itself in a tree behind him.
The bullet remained in the tree for many years.
Until one day Ziegland decided to chop down the tree, it was such a hardy tree that Ziegland
had to turn to dynamite to blow up the tree instead.
He blew the tree to pieces with a few sticks of dynamite but the explosion propelled the
bullet from the tree, straight into Ziegland’s head, killing him.
The very same bullet that was meant for his head all those years ago.
Unbelievable coincidences can sometimes follow a single theme, for example, and this is seriously
weird, it turns out that lost precious rings have a long history of turning up inside the
bellies of fish.
I’ve not lost it, this is a genuine thing, in fact, if you’ve lost your wedding ring
you’d be better off going fishing than actually looking for it.
Accounts of this go all the way back to 500 BC, when the fierce Tyrant of Samos, Polycrates
threw his gold and emerald seal-ring into the sea.
Then, six days later a fisherman brought a fish to Polycrate’s door and presented it
to him.
Whilst preparing the fish, Polycrate’s servants cut into it and what was inside its belly?
None other than the very ring he had cast into the sea a week ago.
An incredible coincidence indeed, but this could be no more than an urban legend, it
was 2,500 years ago after all.
But the same, remarkable coincidence has repeated itself in recent years.
Two tales come from Norway, the first tells of a man called Waldemar Andersen.
Whilst fishing in the North Sea he caught a large cod and brought it home to prepare
for dinner.
He cut open the cod’s stomach to find a gold earring inside.
He gave it to his wife who was shocked, she knew instantly that it was the earring she
had lost a week earlier, when it had fallen into the sea.
There are plenty more fish in the sea but to catch the very one that contains your wife’s
lost earing is nothing short of amazing.
So then what if I told you the second story, also in Norway, took place not over one week,
but ten years?
In 1979, Robert Johansen, aged 15, was fishing in a Norwegian fjord.
Like our last tale, he caught a large cod that would be fitting for his family’s dinner
that evening.
His grandmother prepared the fish back at home and in the fish’s stomach?
None other than a diamond ring, the grandmother instantly recognized it, for it was the same
valuable family heirloom she had lost in the fjord over ten years ago.
And there’s more, John Cross of Virginia lost his ring in 1980 during a vicious storm.
Two years later he found it inside a fish served up to him at his favourite restaurant
in Charlottesville.
Seriously, why do people keep finding their lost jewelry inside fish?
Well how about I explain exactly how in just a moment, but first, one last remarkable story.
The chances of you dying on a ship are extremely low but if your name is Hugh Williams then
it seems your chances of perishing at sea are near impossible.
On December 5th, 1664 a ship sank in the Menai Strait, off the coast of Wales.
All 81 passengers on board died, except one, a man named Hugh Williams.
Then on December 5th of 1785 another ship sank in the Menai Strait, killing all 60 people
on board, except one, a man named Hugh Williams.
Then again on December 5th, 1820 a third ship, guess where it sank, the Menai Strait, 25
people drowned, guess who was the only survivor…
Hugh Williams.
If that’s not enough to float your coincidental boat, get this.
On 10th July 1940, a British trawler was destroyed by a German mine.
Only two men survived the catastrophe, both were named Hugh Williams.
Coincidence seems to favour misfortune.
Nothing exemplifies this more than the fact that four of the world’s most infamous leaders,
worst dictators and genocidal maniacs to have ever lived, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Leon
Trotsky, Josip Tito and Sigmund Freud all share something in common, a very eerie coincidence.
All five men lived in Vienna at the exact same time, before they all became infamous.
They all walked through the same park every day and regularly drank at the same coffee
shop.
The five men didn’t know each other before moving to or spending time in Vienna, some
of them even met whilst living in Vienna and hatched their ambitious plans together to
revolutionise the world in their own image.
But these are the five men who collectively changed the history of Europe and the world
more than anyone before them, of the thousands of cities in Europe, what are the chances
of them all residing in the same city and frequenting the same coffee shop?
What are the chances of five sole survivors of shipwrecks in the same location, on the
same day of the same month, being called the same name?
And for goodness sake, what are the chances of numerous people finding their lost jewelry
inside fish?
What are the chances that a man will be hit in the head by a bullet, flying from the explosion
of a tree; the same bullet shot at his head many years ago?
What are the chances that numerous presidents share so many, very close similarities?
And we all want to know, what are the chances of a Chinese man disrupting the stock market
with his acting?
Well quite high actually.
The chances of each of these apparently highly unlikely events happening to you is minutely
small, but the chance of it happening to someone in the world is very, very high indeed, almost
100% in fact.
We’ve all heard of the law of large numbers but Harvard mathematicians Persi Diaconis
and Fred Mostellar created a new law called the “Law of truly large numbers”.
Which states that given a sample size large enough, any outrageous and unimaginable thing
is highly likely to happen, despite how unbelievable it may be.
Just like how the infinite monkey theorem states that a room full of monkeys randomly
hitting keys on typewriters, will, given long enough, eventually type out the complete works
of William Shakespeare.
We don’t find likely, everyday events particularly remarkable, quite the opposite, we ignore
them.
But we do highlight unlikely occurrences, making them seem inherently more remarkable.
Say you’re running a simulation where the chance of a particular event occurring is
0.1%.
Therefore, the probability that this highly unlikely event will NOT happen is 99.9%.
But if you repeated the simulation 1,000 times, the chance that that event will not happen
at least once is 0.999 to the power of 1,000, or 36.8%.
And so the chance of that event occurring once in 1,000 simulations is now 63.2%, a
bit different from 0.1%.
Run the simulation 10,000 times and the chance of that unlikely event happening is now 99.995%.
If two omnipotent mice are to be believed, then planet Earth is one giant simulation
and there are over 7 billion participants running their own simulations every day by
simply living out their lives.
The chance of something truly remarkable and highly coincidental happening amongst 7 billion
people’s lives is almost 100%.
Given a large enough sample set, ie.
the human race, anything that can happen will happen, eventually.
But of course, when those very special and seemingly miraculous events do occur, they
get global media attention giving them a very high level of recognition.
Yet we pay no attention to the billions of uneventful things that happen around the world
every day.
Roughly 7 billion fish are caught from the wild every day by humans, and probably not
one of them contained someone’s missing diamond ring.
But when you think about the sheer scale of the world and its inhabitants and all the
trillions of things they collectively do each day, the fact that someone didn’t find their
lost diamond ring inside a fish today, never mind this past year, actually seems more unbelievable
than if someone did.
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