Spring Scaries
2026-03-19
For the third time in recent memory, it felt like the world was on fire while the University of Michigan was on spring break. When I was a student at Michigan, I somberly wrote about the 2020 and 2022 spring break incidents (COVID hitting mainstream US life and Russia-Ukraine, respectively). While I’m no longer a student there, I know Michigan was on spring break recently and world news looked bleak. So I thought I’d test my hypothesis.
Using a slew of assumptions, I landed on a procedure to answer if Michigan’s spring break is really as cursed as my recency bias makes it seem.
In my experience, Michigan begins its winter semester within a week of New Year’s Day and has a principle of scheduling spring break during the eighth week of the winter semester. To cast a wide net that should accommodate spring break moving around (because semester start dates are inconsistent), I demarcated the Saturday following seven weeks since Jan 1 as the start of break; the Monday one or two weeks following this as the end of break. This produced reasonable approximations for spring break dates without the need to dig up decades old calendars and fact-check my work.
Thanks to the assistance of Large Language Models, I myself can be a Loopy Lethargic Model and ask, “@gork is this true?”. So I asked Gemini to barf a script that gives me the prices of a stock ticker for certain days using Yahoo finance APIs. I wrote some scaffolding to plug in the last trading day before spring break and first trading day after spring break, and extracted the closing price and opening price for those respective days. The change in price between the closing price before break and the opening price after break can be a measure of the spring scaries effect.
I used the colloquial fear index for the US stock market, VIX, as a measure for the scaries. Just like everything I’ve written so far, the VIX is far from being a perfect measure, but my vague understanding of its calculation method (and popularity) made it an easy candidate to represent forward-looking fear in markets and society. A notable increase in the VIX in a short period indicates rising fears about immediate and near-term (~1 month) volatility in the S&P500, which could be attributed to a significant (geo)political or economic event.
If you’re familiar with any finance vocabulary, you’re already thinking of a dozen ways in which my methods are naive and flawed. The stock market is often detached from reality too, so none of this may make sense. But it made a little sense to me a few weeks ago, so here we are. And since we’re doing disclaimers now, this is a good time to add that none of this is financial advice; you can sponsor my caffeine addiction if you like throwing money around.
Below are some charts and numbers from the 36 years of data available. Don’t look too hard; it’s possible the VIX increases in most weeks of the year anyway.
Median change: 3.38%
Median change: 2.11%
Median change: 6.02%
Median change: 2.46%
There’s some speculation on why late February is a preferred time to stir up Interesting Times™.
During winter, many of us feel The Big SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) as the northern hemisphere experiences shorter days and receives less sunshine. We’re all Vitamin D deficient and exhausted, so a few excursions ought to raise people’s energy levels.
Some regions of the world like Europe also reach their lowest oil and gas storage levels in February. The military scholars say there could be strategic utility in that if you’re thinking of running special military operations with the boys.
Finally, as spring brings the lizards out of hibernation, perhaps it awakens the lizard people too. The lizard people, in all their grogginess, may be knocking over the carefully arranged gameboard of peace and stability we thought we had. Just in time for the kids to visit home, Cancun, or both, over spring break.
Anyway, I probably should’ve posted this to r/wallstreetbets instead.
~ Amal