Unfortunately, the summer is in full swing just as the Olympics kicked off in the August heat. With heads of trading desks and fund managers traditionally trying to find a mid-year respite on a beach somewhere, liquidity ebbs from markets as juniors man the forts. This is similar to LaRusso in The Karate Kid when he moved into the new town; they may neither have the mental fortitude (nor access to bigger risk limits) to commit to big trades to hold up the markets when the hot air that had been bubbling under rising indices dressed up as the AI story explodes in the summer heat.
First released as a single in 1983, Cruel Summer became a global hit for UK all-female pop group Bananarama a year later, reaching number nine on the US Billboard Hot 100 after being included in the 1984 film The Karate Kid.
While schoolboys of my generation struggled to catch flies with chopsticks, a skill Mr Miyagi taught Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid as a life lesson in finding personal balance and training the spirit as well as the body, those of this generation will know the modern Taylor Swift version: a summer romance layered with “these feelings of … yearning for something that you don’t quite have”. “It’s just right there and you just like can’t reach it,” she croons.
