Markets like to present themselves as temples of logic, places where capital flows in response to earnings, interest rates and carefully discounted futures. Yet every so often, the illusion slips and the market reveals something closer to temperament than calculus. This week has been one of those moments.
Consider iRobot, the Massachusetts company that once made the Roomba a minor miracle of domestic life. According to filings and company statements reported by Barron’s and Investing.com, iRobot entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after years of mounting pressure from low-cost competitors and higher import costs. The restructuring plan includes a sale to its longtime manufacturing partner, a deal that will take the company private and wipe out existing shareholders. When markets opened, the stock collapsed by more than 70% in a single session, a brutal epilogue for a brand that once symbolized the promise of friendly consumer robotics.
It was not a macro shock. It was not a sudden recession. It was a slow erosion of confidence, crystallized in one headline. And investors reacted with the speed and finality of a stampede.
On the other end of the emotional spectrum sat Tesla, which appeared to obey a completely different set of rules. As Reuters reported, shares jumped sharply after Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla was testing fully autonomous vehicles on public roads without a human safety driver. There were no new revenue figures, no quarterly surprises, just confirmation that the future, long promised, might be inching closer. The stock rose anyway, buoyed by belief. Around the same time, MarketWatch amplified an analyst’s projection that Tesla could one day justify a $3 trillion valuation, a number so large it functions less as math than as mythology.
The juxtaposition was hard to miss. One robotics company, still selling millions of physical products, effectively vanished from the public markets. Another, still earning most of its money from selling cars, soared on the strength of an idea. Together they felt less like data points and more like characters in a fable.
This is where traders sometimes invoke an old story from Hong Kong finance lore. According to market historians and later chronicled by outlets including CNBC and Wikipedia, there was once a widespread belief that the Hang Seng Index tended to fall whenever actor Adam Cheng appeared in a television drama. The so-called Ting Hai effect, named after a villain Cheng played in a 1990s series, had no plausible causal explanation. Economists dismissed it. Yet the legend endured because it captured something essential: markets are run by humans, and humans are pattern-hungry, anxious, and deeply susceptible to narrative.
Today’s markets no longer blame television schedules, but the impulse is the same. AI optimism swells and deflates with the tone of earnings calls. Autonomous driving demos move billions of dollars in market value. Meanwhile, very real companies, ones with factories, products, and customers, can simply fall out of favor and disappear. As Reuters has noted in broader market coverage, investors are increasingly divided between those chasing long-term technological visions and those retreating from any story that feels even slightly dated.
What makes this moment unsettling is not that experts were wrong, markets have always humbled experts, but how confidently opposing beliefs coexist. One camp looks at Tesla and sees inevitability. Another looks at iRobot and sees a warning. Both believe they are being rational.
Perhaps that is the enduring lesson behind both the Ting Hai effect and this week’s tape action. Markets do not merely process information; they interpret it. They assign meaning, exaggerate themes, and occasionally behave as if haunted by invisible forces. In such moments, prices move not because the future has changed, but because belief has.
And belief, as Wall Street keeps relearning, is one of the wildest forces of all.
