The Hathaway Effect is the apparent correlation between times that American actress Anne Hathaway is cited in news reports and the rise in stock price for Warren Buffett's holding company Berkshire-Hathaway. The Hathaway Effect was first noticed after Hathaway hosted the 2011 Academy Awards. Both the Friday before, and the Monday after the Oscars, the share prices for Berkshire-Hathaway went up substantially. Its price also rose on other days Anne Hathaway made news, including several of her previous films' opening days. Speculation on why this effect occurs has ranged from robotic stock trading programs responding to online news of the search term "Hathaway"; to a more subliminal effect on individual investors who might respond to similar news and then make investment decisions correspondingly; to simply an anomalous coincidence. Discovery of the Hathaway Effect is widely attributed to filmmaker/author Dan Mirvish who first blogged about it in The Huffington Post.
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