Women accounted for nearly all job gains in August. The Bureau of Labor Statistics published this data. Financial media declared it meaningful. Retail traders immediately checked their portfolios to see if this information would make them rich. It will not.
The headline treats gender composition of monthly payroll gains as actionable intelligence. It is not actionable intelligence. It is a demographic observation about 159,000 jobs added in a single month across an economy with 161 million workers. That's 0.09% of the workforce. Your technical indicators have larger margins of error than this entire data set.
Here's what happened: some women got jobs in August. Some men also got jobs in August, but fewer of them. The economy added workers. Those workers had genders. Someone counted the genders. Bloomberg wrote it down. Now you're supposed to trade on this information.
The article promises to explain "why" this happened. The explanation will not help you. It will describe labor force participation rates and sector-specific hiring trends and demographic shifts that have been occurring for decades. None of this will tell you where to put your money next week. None of it will tell you where to put your money next year. It's a rearview mirror strapped to another rearview mirror.
Retail traders will read this headline and think it means something about consumer discretionary stocks or healthcare sector rotation or whatever conspiracy they've cooked up about the Fed. They'll draw trendlines on their charts. They'll post their analysis on Reddit. They'll lose money for completely unrelated reasons and never make the connection.
The labor market data comes out every month. Every month it gets analyzed to death. Every month people pretend it's predictive. Every month the market does whatever it was going to do anyway, and the employment report becomes one more data point that everyone reverse-engineers into their narrative about why they were right all along.
Women got jobs. The sky remained blue. Your calls expired worthless.
Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash
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