By Alec Hogg
Last night the kids in our neighbourhood dressed up in their scary outfits to mock frighten householders who responded by providing an annual sugar fix. All concerned were celebrating the millennia old tradition inherited from the ancient Celts.
October 31 was their new year’s eve, a night when Druid priests adorned animal heads and skins, and lit huge sacrificial bonfires to honour Celtic deities. It marked the end of summer, a spooky night when people believed ghosts roamed earth ahead of the official beginning of the northern hemisphere’s dark, cold winter.
Investors will be hoping this year’s Halloween is the end of a nightmare rather than the start of a new dark period. October was a horrific month for stock markets. Names like Amazon, Alphabet and Netflix, the stock market’s locomotives, fell so heavily that any single digit percentage drop is regarded as a superior performance.
But perhaps Halloween’s best lesson is to be drawn from the movie with the same name. Earlier this year the producers released the 11th instalment of this hugely successful franchise co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, who was in 1978’s original Halloween. Because although the years bring highs and lows, stock markets reward the durable. Like Jamie Lee.