The Dow closed marginally lower after hitting a record. This means precisely nothing happened. A stock index touched a number it had never touched before, then moved backward by an amount so small CNBC had to use the word "marginally" to describe it. Your portfolio is exactly where it was yesterday. Your life has not changed.
The article promises to tell you what will move the market in the next trading session. Spoiler: they have no f*cking idea. Nobody does. If they knew, they would be on a yacht instead of writing headlines about Thursday's big stock stories on Wednesday afternoon. But here we are, pretending that scheduling a presidential interview qualifies as market-moving information.
CNBC will air an exclusive interview with President Donald Trump on Thursday at 5 p.m. ET. This is the news. An interview exists. It will happen at a specific time. Retail traders will watch it. They will hear words come out of a man's mouth. Then they will buy or sell based on which words made them feel the most confident about their ability to predict the future. They cannot predict the future.
Technical analysts look at charts. The charts show that when the Dow hits a record and closes marginally lower, it means the Dow hit a record and closed marginally lower. There is no hidden message. The candlesticks are not trying to communicate with you. The moving averages do not care about your opinion.
Thursday will arrive. The market will open. Numbers will change colors on screens. At 5 p.m. ET, people will watch television and pretend the words they hear matter more than the chart patterns they ignored all morning. By Friday, none of this will have mattered, but CNBC will have already moved on to Friday's big stock stories, which will matter exactly as much as Thursday's did.
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