exotic · marketing explorations · 27 jul 2026Two graphics about missing out
Draft visuals for the landing page and campaign material. Every number on this page is either cited to a public source or computed from public market data, with the method published below. Nothing here is styled guesswork.
Graphic 01 · the access gap
The crowd stops at the S&P 500.
How far a regular customer of each big US brokerage can actually reach, sorted by the size of the crowd, against what the harder-to-reach markets just returned. The right-hand columns are nearly empty. The numbers on top of them are not.
Graphic 02 · after hours
Returns don't keep market hours.
Split every trading day in two: the gap from one close to the next open, when you cannot trade, and the session from open to close, when you can. Compound each half separately and the entire long-run return turns out to live in the half you were locked out of.
That is 8.0% a year while the exchange was shut against 0.7% a year while it was open, from the same index over the same 33 years. The research record says the same thing: the US equity premium has come almost entirely overnight, and independent tallies match this chart, from Bespoke's +722% overnight vs −8.5% intraday through 2020 to Elm Wealth's $17.27 vs $1.20 per dollar over 30 years. Weekend gaps alone, Friday close to Monday open, compounded to +76% over the period.
The other 81% is where the news lands. 99.1% of S&P 1500 earnings announcements are released outside regular hours, and most of the price discovery is done before the bell. Asia's whole trading day happens during New York's night, and the weekend is 65 straight closed hours. Overnight sessions for US names exist now, but they carry US listings only.
Earnings land at 4:05pm. The open already knows. The move happens in the gap, where there is nothing to click. For a Taipei-listed name like TSMC, the ADR's entire long-run gain sits in New York's night, because Taiwan's trading day is New York's night.
Method, honestly
Computed figures use daily official opens and closes from Yahoo Finance
(split-adjusted prices; dividends, costs and taxes excluded). Overnight = today's open over
yesterday's close; day session = today's close over today's open; each is compounded
separately. Regenerate every number with explorations/missing-out-data.py.
This is a decomposition of when prices move, not a tradable strategy: trading costs
wipe it out as a trade, and the ETFs built to harvest it closed within a
year. It is not universal stock by stock (Amazon and
Sony earned more in day sessions than overnight over the same windows), and the New York Fed
reports the futures-market version of the drift fading after
2021. The index-level pattern, however, is exactly what
the papers below document, and our series reproduces the published Bespoke and Elm Wealth
tallies. A few
early-1990s sessions in the source data print the open equal to the prior close, which if
anything undercounts the overnight share.