The Aspirin Indicator – Low Aspirin Sales Indicate a Good Stock Market

Financial news affects aspirin intake.

You open the financial section of the newspaper or go online to check what’s going on with the stock market. You look at the current rises and drops, and think – the stock market is giving me such an unbearable headache, my head might just split in two watching these lows. You pop an aspirin, or a few. The same scenario takes place in thousands of homes and offices worldwide simultaneously. As a result, aspirin sales go up. Is it a coincidence?

This is known as the Aspirin Indicator, or Aspirin Count Theory, and it has to do with the stock market and aspirin having a relationship even more close bound than you’d think. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and doesn’t a splitting headache call for an aspirin? You may not even know at first that this splitting headache is in fact closely correlated with a splitting stock market.

Aspirin and the Stock Market – An Unusual Relationship

What could possibly be the relationship between aspirin and the stock market, you may ask? Didn’t you think the same thing about other superstitions such as the Hemline Indicator or the Superbowl Indicator? Obviously, these are just fun stock market superstitions, but the past has shown that they hold true once in a while. Maybe not all time, that would be kind of creepy, wouldn’t it?

According to Investopedia, the Aspirin Count Indicator is yet another stock market anomaly that, just like the rest, isn’t persistent and exactly why it happens – no one knows. This indicator suggests that when the market rises, there are less stock-market related headaches, so aspirin sales go down, but when the market goes down, aspirin sales go up. Therefore, “lower aspirin sales should indicate a rising market” because a better market causes less headaches. This theory applies to various aspirin-containing painkillers such as Excedrin, as well as to aspirin-free painkillers like Advil or Tylenol. According to CNBC.com, “this is generally considered more of a humorous theory than a concrete strategy.”

The Aspirin Theory in Real Life

One example of this theory was present in 2008, as reported by research-based pharmaceutical company Wyeth. Advil sales went up two percent, up to $673 million, as compared to the previous year. They saw an eight percent increase in sales, up to $171 million in the fourth quarter. This was when the stock market was going through a bad quarter. Also in 2001, aspirin sales were strong during the recession, during which stocks saw sharp falls.

Aspirin Up, Stocks Will Go Up?

This aspirin indicator is just another stock market superstition. This doesn’t mean that a green light should automatically turn on in your head as soon as you hear about aspirin sales reaching lows. It may be an indication that the market is doing very well, but at the same time, the two may be entirely unrelated. A bad market might as well go hand in hand with low aspirin sales, while a good market might keep aspirin sales as high as ever. This is a superstition, and like many superstitions, it has an equally high chance of coming true as it has of not coming true. Anyways, we warned and informed you. You may laugh at it, ignore it, or take it seriously – just don’t consider it a life or death factor when analyzing stocks. You might get a headache just thinking about that.