(Boston) Stocks for dorky, but single, EC males rose Friday for the fifth consecutive trading day as the so-called “February effect” continued to work its magic on the HBS dating market.
“The ‘February effect’ is a phenomenon that occurs every year at the top business schools across the country,” said Rajiv Desai, chief economist for Sanford Bernstein. “In fact, it’s quite similar to the well-known ‘January Effect.'”
“Each January, stocks tend to rise because investors quickly reinvest their money from stock sales they made for tax purposes at the end of the previous year. Each February, dorky single males in their second year of business school suddenly get noticed by single second-year women who have come to the realization that they only have three months left to get their MRS.”
The February Effect is clearly evident at the Harvard Business School.
“I saw Steve Kazmerski with Erin Morley last Thursday,” Kazmerski’s sectionmate Adam Vendetti remarked. “It was more laughable than Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett. And the best part about it was that Erin kept on laughing at Steve’s jokes and touching his arm. I guess she’s given up on finding a Rugby player with a trust fund.”
Kazmerski is just one of many dorky, single EC males who were completely ignored for their first three semesters at HBS but now find themselves the objects of affection for a number of attractive EC women who are classified as being “on the prowl.”
“I bumped into Erica Jaquin yesterday and she kissed me on the check and asked me to dinner,” said Jaquin’s sectionmate Carl Rove, as he looked in the mirror and continued to ignore his ridiculously long nose hair protruding from his left nostril. “And I thought she didn’t like me, since this was literally the first time she’s spoken to me since Admit Weekend.”
Rove has a fool-proof plan to get lucky on their date.
“I’m gonna wear my most colorful golf shirt with over-sized khakis, old running shoes and my best black watch with a calculator built in it. While we’re having appetizers, I’m going to quote the entire third season of the Simpson’s verbatim. When dinner arrives, I’m gonna do my best Monty Python imitation of the Knights who say Ni.” Rove then went on to do the imitation.
Jaquin, who was made aware of Rove’s intentions by H-BS, was neither disconcerted nor offended.
“I don’t want to be moving to Manhattan in July as a 30 year-old single woman,” Jaquin said as she drove to Sloan to take a class for no other reason than to scope out male students on the other side of the river. “If all I can get is a nerd who collects comics, I’ll take it. At least he’s a nerd who went to HBS.”
But according to Rajiv Desai, it is both difficult for investors to profit from the “January Effect,” and for women to score an engagement ring from the “February Effect.”
“The stock market as a whole expects the ‘January Effect’ to happen and it adjusts its prices accordingly. So if you look at historical data, there are few opportunities to actually take advantage of the anomaly.”
“Single EC men at HBS also anticipate the ‘February Effect’ because they experienced a similar situation during ‘Senior Week’ in college when women became attracted to them for the first, and the last, time before B-school.”
“Because of this, these men become as cocky as the HBS men these
women spent the first three semesters actually trying to date.”
“And when this happens, you get what we in the industry have termed the ‘March Effect.’ During the March Effect, those dorky students are sent back to dating exile and those women forget about the whole ‘I gotta marry someone from HBS’ thing and start focusing on actually having fun for the last two months of school.”
