The 618 shopping festival posted weak growth numbers. Consumers in China chose not to spend money. Economists call this a malaise. Technical analysts call it a Wednesday.
Retail traders saw the headline and immediately started charting consumer sentiment indicators. They drew trendlines on discretionary spending. They calculated the correlation between festival sales and the Shanghai Composite. They lost money on all of it because none of that shit matters when people simply refuse to open their wallets.
The festival exists to move merchandise. This year it moved less merchandise than last year. Groundbreaking stuff. Someone at Reuters got paid to write that consumption remains subdued, which is corporate speak for nobody's buying your garbage.
Here's what happened. China promoted a shopping event. Chinese consumers looked at their bank accounts. Chinese consumers then chose to keep their money. The entire global financial media apparatus mobilized to analyze why people with less confidence in the economy might spend less money. Pulitzer-worthy investigation.
Day traders will now pivot to monitoring Chinese retail sales data, cross-referencing it with manufacturing PMI, building complex models that predict consumer behavior based on festival participation rates. They will backtest these models. They will forward test these models. They will deposit more money into their accounts to cover the losses from these models.
The malaise persists, according to the summary. It persists right up until it doesn't. Then it persists again. Then economists write papers about persistence. Then technical analysts ignore all of it and just draw lines on a chart because at least lines are pretty.
Nobody needed this headline to know Chinese consumers aren't spending. The data came out anyway. The analysis followed. The trading strategies adjusted. The accounts depleted. F*cking poetry.
Photo by Nuno Alberto on Unsplash
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