The second-quarter earnings season started strong. Companies beat expectations. Revenue climbed. Margins held. Nobody gave a sh*t.
AI stocks took over the week instead. The same AI stocks that have taken over every week since someone taught a chatbot to write mediocre poetry. Traders watched Microsoft and Nvidia while actual profitable companies reported actual profits to an audience of zero.
Earnings used to matter. A company would post numbers. The stock would move. Analysts would pretend they predicted it. That was the whole game. Now earnings are background music at a party nobody's attending because everyone's in the other room huffing AI hype.
The rotation stole the spotlight. That's the phrase they used. Rotation. Like this was planned. Like investors sat down with a calendar and said "We'll care about fundamentals on Tuesday but Wednesday belongs to AI speculation." They didn't rotate. They ran. They sprinted away from boring things like revenue growth toward exciting things like vibes and momentum and f*cking chatbots.
Retail traders bought the dip on every AI stock with a three-letter ticker while companies that actually manufacture products and employ humans and pay taxes reported to an empty room. The earnings were impressive. The earnings were solid. The earnings were irrelevant.
Technical analysts saw this coming. We always do. Not because we're smart. Because we don't care what the companies do. A chart doesn't know if you're selling semiconductors or selling dreams. It just knows if idiots are buying.
The AI trade dominated again. It will dominate next week. It will dominate until it doesn't. Then everyone will pretend they saw it coming and they'll rotation back to earnings and value and all the things they ignored on the way up.
Strong start to earnings season dies in darkness while algorithms chase the same seven stocks into the stratosphere.
Photo by Jackson Sophat on Unsplash
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