And the FTAV Friday charts quiz winner isn’t . . . 

Out of the goodness of our hearts — and definitely not because of a car crash afternoon at FTAV Towers — we decided to give you all some extra time to do the quiz this time. It didn’t help.

The initial plan had been to hint at a theme to last week’s charts by using JMW Turner, a well-known fixed income degen, as the featured artist. But instead, we chose an eclectic and evidently too tricky mix. Here’s the solution:

This chart shows the capex plans of the AI hyperscalers, and we were after the light blue component — which is Alphabet.

This shows the March 2020 yield movements of the off-the-run US Treasury note maturing in February 2029, which actually understates the level of dysfunction that off-the-runs suffered at the time (judging by the Fed transcripts).

This is the MSCI World Software & Services index, which was last week brutalised by a GitHub update.

As we suspected, a lot of people got the first chart, but the second and third ones tripped up everyone.

We did stress that we wanted specificity, and nearby tenors — like the 10-year yield — are close but no cigar. We demand perfection, and this was actually the 9-year UST, which sold off a lot harder at the peak of the March 2020 mayhem.

The third one also proved difficult, with a lot of people guessing one of the US software indices, but arbitrarily divided by 10. Look, we’re cruel (OK. extremely cruel) but not that cruel.

Was the quiz too hard this week? Possibly. But as David Brent once said, our greatest glory lies not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall. Dust yourself off and come back for the next quiz on Friday, when you’ll be in Louis’s hands. Gird yourself for obscure PCE subcomponents.