So it takes the threat of being boiled alive in their own urine to make a few corporate heads stop and rethink their strategy of embezzling and Ponzi schemes. Which starts to make a lot more sense given that so many CEOs are ...

Professor Hare has actually noticed clear psychopathic patterns in the behavior of the executives at Enron and WorldCom, where executives plunged ahead with destructive and clearly unsustainable practices, unable to make any kind of sane connection between the actions and their consequences. They just blindly plowed ahead, in that way that only the truly crazy can.

GettySuddenly, Windows Phone 7 makes sense.

Fortunately, most psychopaths don't last forever in a corporate environment, because when things go wrong they tend to throw fits, blame others and ultimately just abandon ship. And then, presumably, an equally dangerously unhealthy person takes their place.

GettyAnd that's how dolphins end up covered in oil.

It seems to be a solely psychological effect, with the sun putting the investors in a good mood, making them more likely to try new things, take more financial risks and maybe even ask out Debbie from human resources.

GettyThe sun: The tequila of Wall Street.

Well ... that sort of makes sense. Now try to figure this one out:

According to a study from the Harvard Business Review, for a period of 15 days around a new moon, stock market returns are twice as high as those during the rest of the month. So as we approach a full moon, stock prices drop. It may seem like a coincidence but, again, this is not a minor amount of data here: the researchers analyzed 30 years of market data from 25 countries, even going as far back as 100 years with U.S. stock indexes. So stocks are also the opposite of werewolves.

GettyThat, or stock brokers are all werewolves who get distracted as "the change" approaches.

Financial executives insist that observing a giant space rock is no substitute for conventional market analysis because the system is certainly more complicated and also because no one wants to believe that such a complex job could be done by a random asshole with a calendar. Still, it's refreshing to think that maybe it's not OUR fault for sinking our life savings into that Vietnamese company that makes breast implants for dogs. The moon made us do it.

GettyLook at that flat-chested dog. How could these not take off?

A disdain for Mondays goes beyond cubicle jobs and comic strips about a miserable cat. There is genuinely something awful about the first day of a workweek, and it takes its toll on productivity around the world. The stock market is no exception.

Getty"Oh, sweet Garfield, only you know my pain."

Researchers from Turkey and Texas (no, we're not sure how they met) got together and studied the S&P 500 market index between 1973 and 1997 and found that days of the week can influence how much money you make trading stocks. Like we said before, Mondays are absolutely the worst. Wednesdays yield the highest returns. Fridays, on the other hand, were the drunken college girls of the group, in that they were most likely to go both ways.

GettyAnd on Thursdays, Goldman Sachs gives free vodka to every broker on the floor.

Now there's a reason for the Friday phenomenon -- most economic reports are announced at the end of a workweek, so traders will have Friday to react (or overreact) to whether or not the news is good or bad.

As for Monday and Wednesday, there are a couple of explanations. Part of it is due to short sellers who freak out about their risk exposure over the weekend and close out everything they can, causing the market to drop on Monday. But the much bigger culprit is likely just simple psychology. In fact, whole heaps of studies have tried to understand the "weekend effect" on the stock market, and the majority of them contend the same thing: Investors aren't any more in the mood to do their jobs after the weekend than you are.

GettyJust because you handle billions of dollars of other people's money doesn't mean you don't spend every weekend blackout drunk.

They are less likely to take risks, or yield nearly as much productivity, on Monday as they do later in the week. By Wednesday, however, traders settle back into their routine and are ready to trade the shit out of some textiles, or whatever people are buying these days.