Jim Cramer dropped his top 10 things to watch Monday. Not Tuesday. Not the week. Monday. As if the stock market operates on a meal plan and you need to prep your trades the night before.
Microsoft got an upgrade. Wells Fargo got an upgrade. Two companies with a combined market cap that could buy Finland are now slightly more buyable according to someone with a price target. Retail traders will see this and think they discovered alpha. They did not discover alpha. They discovered a headline.
The summary mentions encouraging M&A activity. Encouraging to whom? The investment bankers billing hours? The CEOs who get to ring a bell? Certainly not to the shareholders who'll watch their stock trade sideways for six months while regulators pretend to read documents.
Cramer made a list of ten things. Ten exactly. Not nine. Not eleven. Because financial television requires the appearance of structure. If he listed nine things, viewers would panic. They'd assume he forgot one. They'd check their portfolios. They'd sell everything and buy gold coins from a radio commercial.
Here's what happens Monday: Microsoft trades. Wells Fargo trades. The M&A activity that was encouraging on Sunday will be priced in by 9:31 AM. By noon, someone will tweet that the upgrade was obvious. By close, Cramer will have seven new things to watch for Tuesday.
But retail traders will spend their Sunday evening highlighting printouts of this list. They'll make a trading plan. They'll set alerts. They'll wake up early Monday, coffee in hand, ready to watch all ten things. And by Wednesday, they'll be down 4% wondering why the list didn't mention that the entire thesis depended on the VIX staying under 14.
The list expires in 24 hours but the losses compound forever.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
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