8 - Macro versus Micro Novelty

Summary

This chapter explores higher order relations between overarching narratives and subnarratives coursing through the stock market, that is, between macro unscheduled and micro unscheduled events. The macro KU events data from Dow Jones financial news is introduced. First, the absolute count of unscheduled macro events reported for the USA is dwarfed by their micro KU counterparts. Second, the macro KU indices share many of the same internal relationships as the corporate KU indices. Both KU macro and micro count data display similar signs of correlations between their associated ESS, relevance, and ENS scores suggesting that both narratives and subnarratives may have a common internal framework. Third, sentiment, relevance, novelty, and inertia indices for macro and micro events are interacted through principal components analysis to create KU micro and macro “narrative” series. The comovement of the two new variables over time is striking that suggests that macro narratives and micro subnarratives are positively related. The fourth key finding is that there is strong statistical evidence of “causality” only in the direction from macro KU events to corporate KU events.