question: If catalysts influence stock price, then why are charts based on trends used to forecast performance?
comment: Trends would show the effects of the catalysts on the price, assuming that they were influenced by the catalysts in the past. I think the larger concern is the issue that trend lines are always projecting forward information which does not actually predict the future. Which is why there is that disclaimer on them. Physical phenomenon can have trend lines developed from experimental data and tend to be helpful in creating regression analysis formula for use on future values. Imagine a slide at a playground, next roll ball bearings from the top and plot where they land. You could produce a graph. That graph would be similar to the trend line of a stock. Clearly it would be a pretty good projection of future ball rolls. Stocks are more volatile, but given longer trend lines and longer time frames the projected values become more useful. For short term use they are not very helpful. Insider information is the best prediction. So why do people use trends. The data is easy to obtain, it is not illegal to use and if everyone is using the same data no one person has a greater advantage.
passages: Catalyst Code is the first full-length book to examine the unique strategic problems faced by economic catalysts (or multi-sided platform businesses), enterprises that add value by facilitating interactions between two or more groups of customers who need each other in some way. Some familiar examples of economic catalysts are matchmakers old and new, auction houses, securities markets, magazines, search engines, shopping centers, credit and debit cards, and software platforms. (The authors analyzed the last two of these in the books "Paying with Plastic" and "Invisible Engines", respectively.)
   Catalyst Code
  
  Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies is a book by Market Platform Dynamics founder David S. Evans and MIT economist (and former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management) Richard L. Schmalensee published in 2007.
  
  Section::::Overview.
   "Catalyst Code" draws on recent advances in economic theory, begun by Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, and extensive interviews conducted by the business strategy consulting firm Market Platform Dynamics, with which both authors are affiliated. The book explains how economic catalysts differ from ordinary, single-sided businesses and presents a new six-part framework for devising strategies for launching and sustaining successful catalyst businesses.
  
  Topics discussed include:
  
  BULLET::::- Chapter 1: What is a Catalyst? explores the profound difference between catalyst businesses and the single-sided businesses that tend to economics and business academics.
   BULLET::::- Chapter 5: Design the Catalyst for Success explores solving the "chicken-and-egg" problem that is common to catalyst businesses.
  
  BULLET::::- Chapter 6: Focus on Profitability examines profitability issues in a multisided business.
  
  BULLET::::- Chapter 7: Compete Strategically with Other Catalysts looks at competition from both sides - how a catalyst entrepreneur can challenge an entrenched catalyst of today, and how a successful catalyst can defend itself against emerging challengers.
  
  BULLET::::- Chapter 8: Experiment and Evolve advises catalyst business entrepreneurs and executives to embrace experimentation as important in igniting a catalytic reaction and to adopt an evolutionary strategy for growth.
   BULLET::::- Chapter 2: Building a Catalyst Strategy explains the importance of building, stimulating, and governing a catalyst business.
  
  BULLET::::- Chapter 3: Identify the Catalyst Community discusses the need for determining the parameters of the possible communities to be served by a new catalyst business, and uses as examples Tufts-New England Medical Center, YouTube, MySpace.com, Diners Club and DoCoMo.
  
  BULLET::::- Chapter 4: Establish a Pricing Structure looks at the factors involved in creating value propositions that persuade all the necessary groups of customers to begin and continue using the platform.
   Stock catalyst
  
  A stock catalyst is an event that causes the price of a security to move, sometimes significantly. Examples of stock catalysts are:
  
  BULLET::::- Company earnings releases
  
  BULLET::::- Investor/Analyst Days
  
  BULLET::::- Analyst revisions
  
  BULLET::::- Product launches
  
  BULLET::::- Management transitions
  
  BULLET::::- Significant dividend changes
  
  BULLET::::- Significant stock buyback changes
  
  In a simplified sense, it is good news or a press release to get people interested in the stock again. Stock catalysts often change investor sentiment and can mark the beginning or end of stock trends. They may affect the perception of a company's discounted future cash flows.
   While a reaction may exhibit one set of kinetic behavior at early conversion, that behavior may change due to:
  
  BULLET::::- changes in catalyst resting state influenced by changing substrate concentrations
  
  BULLET::::- multiple or changing mechanisms influenced by substrate or product concentrations
  
  BULLET::::- catalyst activation (an initiation period)
  
  BULLET::::- product inhibition
  
  BULLET::::- irreversible (or reversible) catalyst death
   BULLET::::- Chapter 9: Cracking the Catalyst Code warns that creating a successful catalyst business code is complex, especially in niches where both profit opportunities and risks are the greatest.
  
  Section::::References.
  
  BULLET::::- Further reading
  
  BULLET::::- Armstrong, Mark, "Competition in Two-Sided Markets", RAND Journal of Economics vol. 37, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 668-691.
  
  BULLET::::- Eisenmann, T. G. Parker, and M. van Alstyne, “Strategies for Two-Sided Markets,” Harvard Business Review (October 2006).
  
  BULLET::::- Evans, David S., “The Antitrust Economics of Multi-Sided Platform Markets,” Yale Journal on Regulation vol. 20, no. 2 (2003): 325-381.
   In 1993, the Board appointed Sheila Wellington, a former secretary of Yale University, to become the new president and CEO. As the leader of Catalyst, Wellington instituted more rigorous research standards, expanded Catalyst studies to include non-US geographies and women of color, and launched the annual "Census of Women Board Directors," which became one of Catalyst's signature studies.
  
  Wellington resigned in 2003 to accept a position at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business.
   For both HTS catalyst and LTS catalyst the redox mechanism is the oldest theory and most published articles support this theory, but as technology has developed the adsorptive mechanism has become more of interest. One of the reasons to the fact that the literature is not agreeing on one mechanism can be because of experiments are carried out under different assumptions.
  
  Section::::Water gas shift reaction.:Carbon Monoxide.
  
  CO must be produced for the WGS reaction to take place. This can be done in different ways from a variety of carbon sources such as: 
  
  BULLET::::- passing steam over coal:
   Section::::Industrial applications.
  
  Knowles' research into asymmetric hydrogenation and its application to the production scale synthesis of L-Dopa gave asymmetric hydrogenation a strong start in the industrial world. More recently, a 2001 review indicated that asymmetric hydrogenation accounted for 50% of production scale, 90% of pilot scale, and 74% of bench scale catalytic, enantioselective processes in industry, with the caveat that asymmetric catalytic methods in general were not yet widely used.
   BULLET::::- CAPP – Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers
  
  BULLET::::- World LP Gas Association – WLPGA
  
  Section::::Innovators.
  
  BULLET::::- Alessandro Volta
  
  BULLET::::- Charles Kettering
  
  BULLET::::- Farrington Daniels – solar energy
  
  BULLET::::- Georges Leclanché – battery
  
  BULLET::::- John Frederic Daniell – Daniell cell
  
  BULLET::::- Rudolf Diesel – compression ignition internal combustion engine
  
  BULLET::::- Georges Imbert – wood gas
  
  BULLET::::- Leonardo da Vinci
  
  BULLET::::- Moritz von Jacobi
  
  BULLET::::- Nikolaus Otto – internal combustion engine
  
  BULLET::::- Robert Stirling – Stirling engine (external combustion)
  
  BULLET::::- Nikola Tesla
  
  BULLET::::- James Watt – steam engine with separate condensor
  
  Section::::Lists.
  
  BULLET::::- List of books about energy issues
   Marconi Automation spent a year developing a proposal in conjunction with Wimpey's of London to produce petrol chemical plant design system which would not only produce accurate tske-off schedules but would flag any instances of pipe conflicts. When Wimpey bought an ICL 1900 computer the management asked that the system be run on that machine. This was not possible.
   Industrial catalysts
  
  The first time a catalyst was used in the industry was in 1746 by J. Hughes in the manufacture of lead chamber sulfuric acid. Since then catalysts have been in use in a large portion of the chemical industry. In the start only pure components were used as catalysts, but after the year 1900 multicomponent catalysts were studied and are now commonly used in the industry.
   BULLET::::- 1997: "A New Approach to Flexibility: Managing the Work/Time Equation"
  
  BULLET::::- 1998: "Women of Color in Corporate Management: Dynamics of Career Advancement"
  
  BULLET::::- 1999: "Women Scientists in Industry: A Winning Formula for Companies"
  
  BULLET::::- 2000: "Breaking the Barriers: Women in Senior Management in the UK"
  
  BULLET::::- 2001: "Women of Color Executives: Their Voices, Their Journeys"
  
  BULLET::::- 2002: "Europe, Women in Leadership: A European Business Imperative"
  
  BULLET::::- 2003: "Bit By Bit: A Catalyst Guide To Advancing Women In High Tech Companies"
  
  BULLET::::- 2004: "The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity"
   BULLET::::- Evans, David S. and Richard Schmalensee. Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
  
  BULLET::::- Evans, David S., Andrei Hagiu, and Richard Schmalensee. Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
  
  BULLET::::- Evans, David S. and Richard Schmalensee, “The Industrial Organization of Markets with Two-Sided Platforms,” Competition Policy International, vol. 3, no. 1 (2007): 151-180.
  
  BULLET::::- Hagiu, Andrei, “Merchant or Two-Sided Platform?” Working Paper, Harvard Business School, May 2007.
   BULLET::::2. Phi value analysis assumes the folding "pathway" isn't significantly altered, though the folding "energies" may be. As nonconservative mutations may not bear this out, conservative substitutions, though they may give smaller energetic destabilizations which are harder to detect, are preferred.
   This staged prioritization of options was first developed by John Green while he was the international market research manager at Xerox in London in the mid 1970s. A simpler questionnaire, where the respondent only allocated a single total budget across many of the various matrix options available, to build his ‘personal specification’, was used by Ford in Detroit in the late 1940s. More recently this single stage budget allocation approach has been used by many manufacturers on their web-sites to collect a given respondents preferred specification having been shown the costs of different options. Also this single budget allocation, without the multiple prioritisation stages, is a part of some variants of modern conjoint trade-off analysis. The algorithms required for the modelling predictions of SIMALTO data enabling potential market share calculations and needs-based analysis were first created in the early 1980s, with major improvements and extended capabilities introduced in 2000.
   Section::::Traditional trade promotion forecasting methods.
  
  Many companies forecast the impact of trade promotions primarily through a human expert approach. Human experts are unable to take into account all the variables involved and also cannot provide an analytic prediction of campaign behavior and trends. A recent survey by Aberdeen Group showed that 78 percent of companies used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as their primary trade promotion forecasting technology tool. The limitations of spreadsheets for trade promotion planning and forecasting include lack of visibility, ineffectiveness and difficulty in tracking deductions.
   In addition to simply slowing the reaction, a change in catalyst resting state over the course of the reaction may result in competing paths or processes. Multiple mechanisms may be present to access the product, in which case the order in catalyst or substrate may change depending on the conditions or point in the reaction. A particularly useful probe for changes in reaction mechanism involves examination of the normalized reaction rate vs. catalyst loading at multiple, fixed conversion points. Note that the normalized reaction rate:
   Promoters can cover up surface to prevent production of a mat of coke, or even actively remove such material (e.g., rhenium on platinum in platforming). They can aid the dispersion of the catalytic material or bind to reagents .
  
  Section::::Current market.
  
  The global demand for catalysts in 2010 was estimated at approximately US$29.5 billion. With the rapid recovery in the automotive and chemical industries overall, the global catalyst market is expected to experience fast growth in the coming years.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Chemical reaction
  
  BULLET::::- Substrate
  
  BULLET::::- Reagent
  
  BULLET::::- Enzyme
  
  BULLET::::- Product
  
  BULLET::::- Abzyme
  
  BULLET::::- Acid catalysis (includes Base catalysis)
   BULLET::::- 2005: "Women "Take Care," Men "Take Charge:" Stereotyping Of U.S. Business Leaders Exposed"
  
  BULLET::::- 2006: "Different Cultures, Similar Perceptions: Stereotyping of Western European Business Leaders"
  
  BULLET::::- 2007: "Making Change: LGBT Inclusion – Understanding the Challenges"
  
  BULLET::::- 2008: "Unwritten Rules: What You Don't Know Can Hurt Your Career"
  
  BULLET::::- 2009: "Opportunity or Setback? High Potential Women and Men During Economic Crisis"
  
  BULLET::::- 2010: "Pipeline's Broken Promise"
  
  BULLET::::- 2011: "Sponsoring Women to Success"
  
  BULLET::::- 2012: "Good Intentions, Imperfect Execution? Women Get Fewer Of the “Hot Jobs” Needed To Advance"
   BULLET::::- Reflecting the need to evaluate the efficiencies of corporate mergers on a case-by-case basis, first assessing mergers through routine tools with modest information requirements and then assessing them further, including an efficiency defence, may be an information efficient framework for evaluations (with Johan Stennek and Frank Verboven).
   Other industries, such as fashion, may derive a substantial portion of their competitive advantage from selling at a higher margin, rather than higher sales. For high-end fashion brands, increasing sales without sacrificing margin may be critical. The DuPont identity allows analysts to determine which of the elements is dominant in any change of ROE. 
  
  Section::::ROI analysis.:Examples.:High turnover industries.
   Economic catalyst
  
  An economic catalyst is an entrepreneur or company that precipitates a fundamental change in business or technology. A more precise definition of a catalyst is based on the new economics of multi-sided platforms. In this literature an "economic catalyst" is an entity that has (a) two or more groups of customers; (b) who need each other in some way; but (c) can't capture the value from their mutual attraction on their own; and (d) rely on the catalyst to facilitate value-reaction reactions between them. For-profit businesses, joint ventures, cooperatives, standard-setting bodies, and governments operate catalysts.
  
raw_presuppositions: Trends can't show the influence of a catalyst on stock price.
raw_corrections: Trends can show the effects that a catalyst has on stock price.