Reading the signs: on inferential semiotics and market imagination

ABSTRACT

The paper concerns a historical shift in the semiotic interpretation of financial data and how this shaped the imagination of the market. The investigation centres on the emergence of two systems of financial foresight, technical and fundamental analysis. It is demonstrated how both systems were synthesised around the codification of certain pieces of data as semiotic windows to the future which the experienced analyst could interpret but also gainfully narrate to others. This semiotic capacity to read and retell financial signs was an important feature in the construction of financial analysts’ professional reputability, and potential to convince through their predictions. The piece concludes with an outline of how the genealogy’s results can also inform recent scholarship on the formation of economic future expectations, the constitution of market ontologies, and the structure and power of financial analysts’ form of expertise.

KEYWORDS:

• Signs
• inference
• financial analysis
• symptomatology
• divination

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While this body of surviving literature is attributed to Hippocrates, it is generally assumed that the corpus is compiled by texts from multiple, to us unknown, contributors (Lloyd 1983, 10).

2 Greek divination, which at least in part derived from Mesopotamian traditions of divination tends to be divided following the same taxonomy of inspired and technical divination, but in contrast the Greek placed greater importance on the inspired kind (Manetti 1993, 19; Annus 2010).

3 Warren Buffett, a student, employee, and disciple of Graham and Dodd refers to their writings as ‘a roadmap for investing’ that he has ‘been following for 57 years’. He’s currently in possession of Dodd’s original personal copy of Security Analysis, filled with marginal notes in preparation for the 1940 edition. Buffett got it from Dodd’s daughter: ‘No gift has meant more for me’, he says. (Buffet 2009, xi–xii).

4 George Homans thanks, and dedicates many of his works to Henderson, Talcott Parson mentions a debt of ‘outstanding significance’, and William Whyte notes in his appendix to ‘Street Corner Society’ that Henderson insisted on his use of ethnography (Barber 1970, 43–47, 50).