Wondering when you’ll be able to look at your investments again? The answer may actually be in the stars—the pop stars, that is.

That’s the theory of Philip Maymin, assistant professor of finance and risk engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Maymin looked at more than 5,000 hit songs from a half-century of Billboard charts, measured them against the stock market, and found that the beat of popular music has an eerie connection to the performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

When Wall Street is jumpy, he discovered, we prefer music with a consistent tempo…Conversely, in a calm market, music charts are populated by songs with more unpredictable beats–tempos that slow down or gain speed, or even veer from the 4/4 rhythm that typifies most pop music.

[Boston]