You don’t have to settle for something as mundane as tea leaves if you want to know where the stock market is going next.

The lipstick yardstick can be a lot more colourful.

And some say the production of butter in Bangladesh can tell you not only whether the market’s on its way up or down, but also by how much.

Then there’s the Tylenol index, or the Aspirin index, says Warren Baldwin, regional vice-president with investment manager T. E. Wealth.

The idea is that when sales of these remedies go up, it’s because lots of people are having headaches, and that’s because they’re stressed out, and if they’re stressed out, then things might not be going so good at the company they work for.

Not that Baldwin looks at pain killers, tea leaves or entrails as signals of when to invest; T. E. Wealth is solidly in the camp of those who believe you can’t time the market. Still, it can be interesting to see what market mavens have come up with in an attempt to gain an edge.

Years ago, people talked about the odd lot index, Baldwin says. The thought was that there were the serious buyers who bought board lots, in blocks of a hundred shares, and then there were the small investors who couldn’t afford more than odd lots, maybe five or 10 shares at a time. And those are the people who usually come into the market way too late. So, when you saw more of those trades creeping in, you could figure that, whatever direction the market was going, whether that was up or down, was about to change.

Baldwin thinks that one might have held a smidgen of truth in its time. These days, though, such trades just aren’t a significant force in the market. Machines now buy and sell huge blocks of stocks on the orders of arcane mathematical formulas, and the little guy can take his small change to any one of hundreds of mutual funds.

So, Baldwin settles these days for being amused by some of the stranger theories advanced on predicting the stock market.

Take the swimsuit signal put forward by the fine fellows (surely it must have come from mavens of the male persuasion) at Bespoke Investment Group LLC.

Over the last three decades, an American has appeared on the cover of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 16 different years, Bespoke researchers have managed to figure out. The average performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index during those 16 years was an annual gain of 10.6 per cent. And the market measure rose in 13 individual years out of those 16 years.

In 15 years, however, the magazine’s cover featured a non-American model. The S&P 500 averaged an annual gain of only 7.2 per cent and rose in only 11 years.

Last year’s market decline of 38.5 per cent hurt the overall average return for years when an American appeared on the cover (somebody check Marissa Miller’s passport), illustrating that, like the Super Bowl indicator, there are always exceptions to the rule, Bespoke says on its website.