Introducing Augustus Rollo Cooney.

I read the Financial Times most mornings, and I have noticed that reporting of the events of the last few weeks has featured more negative, emotive words than usual. Meltdown, crisis and armageddon, for example.

It makes sense that the word "crash" would appear more now than it had a few months previous, but a few days ago I became curious to what extent emotive words correlated with the news itself. On a whim I wrote down a two lists of words. The first list was of negative words ("worse, shock, meltdown"). I could think of 44, including some random tenses. The second list was of positive words ("rally, boost, hope"). I then wrote a script to count the frequency of these words on the front page of the FT each day over the previous month.

I know this is an unsophisticated approach, but it has the virtue of being very simple. Here is the result, with the vertical axis representing the difference in sentiment, with positive numbers corresponding to bulls and negative to bears.

There are several big movements where bear (negative) words beat out bull (positive) words by large margins on the sixth, 10th, 16th, and to a lesser extent on the 30th.

The big news on the sixth was a recap of the worst week for equities for the past six years, with the headline "Share falls increase gloom". Bear words beat bull words by 13. By contrast, the previous day bulls beat bears by one, and the lead story was "Moscow forced to shore up rouble".

Bulls beat bears by 7 on the ninth, and the headline was "Markets rally after US loans bail-out". This positive sentiment reversed dramatically the next day as bears beat bulls by 9, with the headline "US stocks suffer as Lehman falls 45%".

There is another bearish swing between the 15th, when bear words beat bull words by 5, and the 16th, where the gap had spread to 17. The headline in the FT on the 16th was "Day or reckoning on Wall St", as the market saw what was at the time its biggest one day fall since 9/11. The following day the difference spread to 23 as HBOS shares fell 40%.

I will keep an eye on the difference over the coming weeks, as one more trigger for burying gold in the back yard, and perhaps ultimately heading for the hills.

Tags: economy