Gallows Humour

There's nothing traders like more than a bit of topical humour when tensions are running high. Well, maybe winning trades and a hatful of golden logs perhaps. Jokes, like rumours, spread fast in the market, and these days with everyone on Instant Messenger or Bloomberg Chat, you don't even have to go to the trouble of picking up the phone and wasting time on greetings and small talk - just copy and paste to all your contacts. As a result you will invariably get the same joke from a number of different sources in quick succession. The competitive element comes in by trying to be a source rather than a sink for jokes, which further encourages rapid dissemination.

In order to be properly viral, the joke should be short, witty, topical and poke fun at the financial markets (or rather the people involved in them) at a time of highest stress, like last week. I don't know anyone who has been hanged, but I can imagine how the term 'gallows humour' originated...

My favourite joke from last week was a very brief, simple, fake headline, that at first glance looked just like any other of the thousand newswire entries that we had been nail-bitingly glued to for more than ten hours a day.

REUTERS 10-10-08 09:25:26 - *CENTRAL BANK OF JAMAICA SAYS EVERYONE SHOULD JUST CHILL OUT

Kudos, and thanks for the smile, whoever came up with that one :-)