The usual account of markets runs from event to reaction. A central bank decides or an election is lost, and prices and sentiment follow. Mikko Ketovuori reads the sequence the other way round. In his view the mood of a society shifts first, and the events that later fill the headlines are its result.
He has tested the idea on an unusual data set: the Finnish pop charts. In May 2006 the hard rock band Lordi won the Eurovision Song Contest for Finland with “Hard Rock Hallelujah”. Three years later the financial crisis had arrived and the mood of the country had turned. Together with Matt Lampert of the Socionomics Institute, Ketovuori built a tool that measures optimism and pessimism in pop songs and applied it to random samples of Finnish chart songs from 2006 and 2009. The 2009 sample was significantly more pessimistic. The study appeared in the Cambridge journal Popular Music in 2018.
Homo sentiens
His new book, “Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood”, takes the argument beyond music. Thirteen essays on 160 pages connect music, media, history and economics, and they share one premise: we are Homo sapiens, the rational thinkers, and at the same time Homo sentiens, the feeling humans. Shared emotions rise and fall in waves, and revolutions, booms and busts follow those waves. The book compresses the thesis into one line: history does not repeat itself, social mood does.
Ketovuori holds a PhD, lives in Turku, Finland, and has lectured across Asia, Europe and North America. His previous book, “Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society”, was published by Routledge in 2024. The field goes back to Robert Prechter, who has also endorsed the new book. Readers of this series know the name from my conversation with his son Elliott Prechter on Elliott waves.
Where mood meets the cycle
Cycle analysis starts from the data. I measure the dominant rhythm in a price series and project it onto the right side of the chart. The method says when a vibration is due to turn. It does not say what is vibrating.
Social mood is a candidate for the answer. Socionomic theory treats the stock market as the fastest register of collective mood, because a buy or sell order takes seconds while hiring, legislation and wars take months or years. In this view a price chart is a recording of mood, and the cycles I detect in it are the rhythm of collective emotion.
That leads to the point I want to test on Monday. A wave of mood has a form: optimism builds, peaks and gives way to fear. Whether it also has a period that can be measured is a different matter, and it decides how far the two schools can be combined. If mood keeps a rhythm, cycle tools can time it. If it only keeps a form, the cycle supplies the clock and mood supplies the context.
What I will ask Mikko
Four points are on my list for the conversation:
How social mood can be read in the here and now, before the events it produces, and which indicators beyond the stock market carry the signal.
Whether the waves of mood show a stable length, or whether they morph the way market cycles do.
What the pessimistic mood he describes for the present implies for the economy and for financial markets.
What Homo sentiens means for economic models built on the rational investor.
Live on Monday
The Cycles TV Special runs live on Monday, October 12, 2026, at 1800 CEST on the YouTube channel of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles:
Questions for Mikko are welcome in the live chat or in the comments below.
“Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood” is published by Iff Books on October 27, 2026 in the UK and on November 3, 2026 in the US.
Book page: collectiveinkbooks.com/iff-books/our-books/waves-of-change
Foundation for the Study of Cycles: cycles.org