Act. v. What a financial market supposedly does. As if it were a living creature with a sense of self and volition . . . Depicting a financial market as an athlete sprinting, leaping or cliff diving makes news coverage more exciting than a droning flux of numbers. The above definition is from "The Devil's Financial Dictionary," Jason Zweig's market-focused version of Ambrose Bierce's brilliant early-20th-century satire on the meaning of common words. Zweig cites research by Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School, who wrote (with three other professors) a paper titled "Metaphors and the market: ... (full story)