Exposing the malarkey behind reporting on stock market changes

We've all heard or read a variation of this and we've generally accepted it: "The stock market was up 400 points today on news that the inflation rate slowed in February."

Or, "Stocks were down sharply today, due to concerns over tensions in the Middle East."

Or, "Stocks remained were mixed today on news that Apple expects fourth-quarter earnings to fall short of expectations."

That's the template for reporting on the stock market – one that has been in place at least since I was a kid, when virtually every radio or TV broadcast had a "business" segment that primarily reported on the stock market.

I call baloney.

The connection of news events and the stock market is something that we accept because we've all heard it for decades. We're like people in the Middle Ages who were sure the sun rotated around the Earth because they'd heard it for decades. Or Raiders fans who believe their team is special because they've heard themselves say it for decades.

A caveat: Sometimes, news events do drive the performance of the stock market. When there's dramatic financial news (a country declares bankruptcy, Microsoft or Apple announces a brilliant success or miserable failure, a catastrophic news event happens), it affects the stock market.

But the rest of the time, here's what I suspect happens: Business reporters look at the stock market and then find a news item that could have some sort of financial angle. And connect them.

Stocks are up on the news of . . . uh . . . a trade agreement between Panama and Canada! Or maybe a tech company's earnings are better than expected. Or maybe the number of jobs created last month were up.

Stocks are down on news of . . . uh  . . . an oil spill in Saudi Arabia! Or persistent rumors that the Fed may raise interest rates. Or reports that a big company will have a disappointing report.

I spent several years choosing stories to appear on the Daily Republic business pages. I always suspected the reporting on the stock market was bunk, but I also always picked stock market stories because they're the scoreboard of the financial world.

Over the past decade, we've become more sophisticated in how we view the stock market. We realize that an increase in stock prices doesn't mean that thing are better for all of us. We realize that stock prices going down doesn't mean imminent catastrophe for all of us.

The stock market is not directly connected to us, any more than an increase in the stock market is connected to the news of the day.

Really, it's absurd when you think about parallels. What if someone wrote, "The new Batman movie had a huge weekend box office after news broke Friday that Samsung's new Galaxy phone exceeded sales expectations."

Or if you read, "The Warriors won their third straight game last night on news that Russia was sending more troops to the Ukrainian border."

How about if someone reported, "The number of COVID infections dropped today on news that Britney Spears' conservatorship would end."

We'd laugh at that. Or . . . maybe we'd adopt that as our strategy.

Consider a world where you make this kind of announcement: "I won't make it to work today on news of disappointing fourth-quarter earnings for Exxon."

Or you explain away a failure by saying, "I didn't clean up the kitchen because of rumors that Netflix is raising their monthly fees."

Wait a second. Maybe this all makes sense. And if it doesn't, that's probably due to rumors that the Fed may boost the prime rate.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Rylaz? Montelukast? Blame smart FDA rule for weird drug names

Turns out that drug-makers aren't idiots with a fetish for weird names. They may be ruthless monsters who charge exorbitant amounts for life-saving drugs that cost a small fraction of that amount to create, but they're not crazy when it comes to drug names.

There's a reason that the drug your doctor prescribed for your cholesterol or high blood pressure has a bizarre name: It's due to a rule of the Food and Drug Administration.

Yeah, the FDA is to blame for crazy names. Or maybe the FDA should receive credit for the crazy names because it's for a good reason. It all comes from the desire to save confusion at the pharmacy.

Actually, that's not the full story, because we often get confused by the weird names (do you remember the names of your prescriptions? I don't).

But the unusual names – for instance, among the 25 most popular drugs are the hard-to-remember and hard-to-pronounce Levothyroxine, Montelukast, Furosemide and Trazodone – come from an effort to prevent mix-ups among drugs with similar names. Anyone who has brought home Pepsi instead of Pepsid or pesto instead of pasta can understand this: What if you ask for something and the pharmacist accidentally gives you a drug with a name that sounds the same?

It could be like when Mr. Gower in "It's a Wonderful Life" nearly gave deadly drugs to someone during George Bailey's vision of an alternate future (the focus of another column).

But enough about that.

The FDA's standard is that a drug name must be 70% dissimilar from all other names in its database. That database has 36,000 drug names, so it's a challenge, one that is met when drug companies produce such products as Amlodipine and Meloxicam. Or consider the official names of drugs you've probably taken in the past year: Comirnaty and Spikevax. Those are the official names of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19. (If  I was Moderna, I would have leaned into the official name. Spikevax is an elite vaccine name!)

Anyway, drug names must be unique. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, there are companies that earn big paydays from drug companies to compare proposed new drug names with existing ones and either attest that they're significantly different or (presumably) present an alternative.

Here's the looming problem. Will we get to a point where there are so many drugs that drug companies will run out of names? Is it possible that sometime in the future, drug names will become like passwords? If they keep coming up with these new drug names (Voxzogo, Tivdak and Rylaz were all approved by the FDA in 2021), there's a limit, right? How far away are we from a world where our drug name must have one capital letter, one lower-case letter, one letter and one symbol?

Are we headed to a future, where we call or stop in our local pharmacy and tell them we need a refill of F8jkLd$5!t?

I guess that will work, unless they have it close to their supply of F8jkLd$6!t, which could cause a mixup (although I guess F8jkLd$6!t isn't 70% different).

Just the idea makes me anxious and when that happens, I turn to ancient wisdom from Readers Digest: Laughter is the best medicine.

But according to my unofficial internet research, that isn't necessarily 70% different from nitrous oxide (laughing gas), so I hope it's OK.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Guilty pleasure songs: 10 disliked pop hits you secretly enjoy

In adulthood, I still don't want people to make fun of my music choices.

I have some ridiculous musical loves. I like Barry Manilow. I like the boy bands of the late 1990s. I think "Mmm-bop" is one of the greatest pop songs ever written.

I have other musical tastes, but they're not as amusing. But I admit this: If I'm listening to a Partridge Family song or "Hot Rod Lincoln" and someone pulls up next to me at a stoplight, I generally reach over and turn down the music. Because it's a guilty pleasure – a song I like, but feel embarrassed to do so.

You're probably similar. There are songs that you publicly mock, but if you're alone and they come on, you find yourself happy. They're guilty pleasure songs.

Here are 10 you secretly like, in alphabetical order.

"Achy, Breaky Heart," by Billy Ray Cyrus. The song was absurd. His mullet was absurd. The song was infectious. His mullet was awesome. Can we just be honest and not apologize for liking this song?

"Bye, Bye, Bye" by N'Sync. Maybe the height of the boy bands craze, this song is tremendous (and so is "I Want it That Way" by the Backstreet Boys). You like it. But dislike yourself for that fact.

"Careless Whisper" by Wham! Guilty feet ain't got no rhythm, but we still get sucked in by the song. If someone pulls up next to you while you're singing "I should have known better than to cheat a friend . . ." you'll turn this down. But you won't turn it off.

"Convoy," by C.W. McCall. He talks. He uses CB language. He proposes that a group of big rigs race across the country (never stopping for gas?) and crash through barricades. But you secretly enjoy it, right? 10-4.

"Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," by Rupert Holmes. A dumb story song about a couple unwittingly writing classified advertising notes to each other (reminder: Support your local newspaper). Two guarantees: When it comes on, you'll say it's dumb. And you'll sing the chorus.

"Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee)," by Paul Revere and the Raiders. Bubblegum pop with the perfect ending. Admit it: You enjoy hearing this every 20 years or so when it accidentally comes on.

"In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans. This was presumably embarrassing to like in 1970 (a year after it was released) and remains so now. But you hear it and you find yourself envisioning people not needing their teeth or eyes because there's nothing to chew and no one looks at them. Another song with a great ending.

"Livin' La Vida Loca," by Ricky Martin. We all make fun of Ricky Martin. Then this song comes on and we realize how great it was (although we pretend it's not).

"Stayin' Alive," by the Bee Gees. This was widely mocked about 10 years after it was a hit and everyone still mocks it by doing the finger-pointing disco move. Then the song comes on . . . and you do the finger-pointing disco move. With joy.

"U Can't Touch This," by MC Hammer. Go ahead and complain that Hammer stole the music from "Superfreak" by Rick James. Blame Hammer for making saccharine hip-hop for white suburban kids. But you'll yell "Hammer time!" and envision him dancing in those genie pants.

There are more guilty pleasure songs – many more – but start with those 10.

Right now, you are insisting that you don't like them, but you're lying to yourself.

But maybe one day when we've learned, Cherokee nation will return.

Will return. Will return. Will return.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

It's all in a name when it comes to diet sodas

Whatever happened to diet sodas?

If you're like me (and it's best if you're not), you noticed the slow decline of diet sodas over the past few years.

Sugar-free, no-calorie sodas haven't disappeared. But "diet" sodas are apparently taboo.

Instead, we have "No Sugar" sodas. And "Zero Calorie" sodas. And other variations.

I'm famously a Type 1 diabetic (by "famously," I mean people in my immediate family know it, as do readers bored by occasional articles over the years when I've poked fun at my disease and asked for it to be named after me). That means if I drink sodas, they're of the no-sugar variety.

For most of my life, "diet" was the only word used to describe no-sugar drinks. Diet Coke. Diet Pepsi. Diet Rite. Diet 7-Up. Even Diet Shasta and Diet Cragmont (the Safeway brand until the 1990s).

But about 15 years ago, alternatives began to pop up, forcing me to read labels so I could understand whether these were replacements for the diet versions or something else. Maybe a fat-free soda? Maybe caffeine free?

The first I saw was Coke Zero. Was it zero calories? Zero carbohydrates? Zero fat? Zero caffeine? Zero Mostel? (Star of "Fiddler on the Roof," who died 45 years ago.)

I read and re-read the label to make sure I wasn't accidentally drinking regular soda.

In the past few years, it came to the point that almost no soda brands call their no-sugar drinks "diet." Apparently, younger people don't like the word diet, so it's better to call something "zero" or "no-sugar" or "zero-sugar" or "carb-NO-hydrates" (the last of those was just invented by me. Food companies are free to use it).

This is significant because, even though Millennials and members of Gen Z don't like the word "diet," they still want low-calorie, no-sugar drinks. Sugar-free drinks make up nearly 30% of carbonated drink sales in the United States, accounting for about $11 billion in sales in 2020.

As a member of the sugar-averse community (another term I just invented), I have something at stake here. I don't mind the name changes and think I look cooler drinking something called "Pepsi Max Zero-Sugar Xtreme," rather than Tab or Fresca, the diet sodas most available when I became a diabetic (both of which were marketed primarily to women who wanted to drop a few pounds).

My only request is that Coke and Pepsi and Royal Crown and Shasta and other soda manufacturers would give me a heads up, so I know which sodas I can drink. It also frees up space in my local grocery store, since it doesn't require me to stand there and read a tiny-print nutritional label.

I'm still very confused about the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero Sugar. I still don't know if Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero Sugar are different. But I do appreciate that soda companies continue to try new things. Some new drinks, many new names.

Those of us in the sugar-averse community stand ready for a carb-NO-hydrate drink.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Bradstradamus is back with a glimpse at what will happen in 2022

Bradstradamus is back.

Anyone familiar with history (or the History Channel) is familiar with my great-great-great (keep going) grandfather, Nostradamus. Grandpa N, as we call him, was famous for his predictions that had an eerie way of coming true.

For instance, in the years around 1460, Grandpa N made the following predictions (which came true):

"Nations will battle each other and only some will win." (Came true in the Revolutionary War. Or World War I. Or World War II. Or the World Cup of soccer.)

"Four men will succeed where others haven't." (The Beatles. Or the Los Angeles Rams' defensive line "Fearsome Foursome" of the 1960s. Or George Foreman and his grills, am I right?)

"A leader with a mustache will arise in the West." (Adolph Hitler. Or Theodore Roosevelt. Or Tom Selleck, since Hawaii is the westernmost state in the United States.)

Coincidence? Hardly. Grandpa N was amazing and because of that, I take seriously my responsibility to share with you some prognostications for 2022.

The last time Bradstradamus did this, I correctly predicted the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 prediction: "Some people will get sick and most will recover." Another correct prediction from Bradstradamus in 2020: "The author of this column will refer to himself in the third person at some point in the future." Bradstradamus made that come true. Today.)

Amazing.

With that as a precursor, here is a look ahead to what to expect in 2022:

• In late August, Californians will be warned that it could be a bad wildfire year because there was so much rain in the winter. Or so little rain. Or just the right amount. But it will be a bad wildfire season, for sure.
• You will be in a store, faced with two checkout line choices. You will pick one and the other will move faster.
• You'll be in heavy traffic and the car version of that thing in the store will happen to you. The other lane will move faster.
• While in the checkout line at that same store in the earlier prediction, you'll see a celebrity magazine and have no idea who the person on the cover is.
• A major professional athlete will succeed this year.
• On an important day in 2022, you'll wake up to see a mystifying pimple on your face and complain that pimples should disappear at age 21.
• You will read a column about what will happen in 2022. (Bingo! One prediction already is true!)
• At least once in the first two months of the year, you'll hear someone say, "How is it already 2022? Wasn't it just 2000?" It may be you who says that.
• The next COVID variant will have a side effect: We'll learn another letter in the Greek alphabet.
• You will be really hungry for specific fast food (or grocery store food) and it will disappoint you.
• Eleven months from now, you'll say, "how is 2022 almost over? It just started!"
• Some people will get sick and most will recover.
• The author of this column will refer to himself in the third person.

Bradstradamus is done. Happy New Year and don't stress too much about picking the wrong line at the store.

Reach Brad Stanhope at brad.stanhope@outlook.com.