Saturday, September 12, 2009

Chocolate Chip Cookies versus the Stock Market


Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, based on one pound (453.6 gm) of chocolate chip cookies

It may seem strange that I would look into this analysis, especially since I don't eat chocolate, but I thought it would be interesting to see if there might be a correlation between the cost of chocolate chip cookies and the Standard & Poors 500. If you take a look at the graph, you will notice that the cost of chocolate chip cookies (brown line) starts to increase as the stock market (blue line) drops, as you can see around July of 2001 and October of 2007.

When the S&P 500 bottoms out and begins to rise, the cost of chocolate chip cookies starts to decline. Look at February 2003 and March of 2009. The question is, does the increase in the cost of chocolate chip cookies cause a drop in the S&P 500, or does a drop in the S&P 500 cause an increase in the cost of cookies? Since it looks like the cookie cost is topping out, maybe the stock market will be moving upward for a while. Or maybe there is no correlation and we should just eat our cookies.

If you like interesting correlations, you should check out Correlation Between the Stock Market and Sun Spots, The MacWorld Expo Apple Stock Correlation, Gasoline at the Pump versus S&P 500, and the Hurricane & Stock Market Indicator.

By Stockerblog.com

1 comment:

Sean Rushforth said...

Hi, I’ve started to put together a few bits and pieces on spread betting if anybody is interested Trading Spreads any comment of feedback would be much appreciated

Sean :)