The tempest

{{quote|“It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.”

— [[Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]]

The financial markets are seasonal. There are times of fallow, times of harvest, times of maintenance, and times of storm. The activity of all the tillers, farm hands, shepherds and la bourers varies by season and climactic conditions. Everyone works hard to till and plant in the spring. Once the crops are growing in the summer, they go on holidays. After the harvest there is the traditional three-month layoff when no-one pays the blindest bit of attention to the markets because everyone is arguing about their compensation.<ref>There is a reason why so many catastophes take place in the Autumn: