The Dow climbed 400 points on Friday. Retail traders everywhere immediately updated their LinkedIn bios to include "market expert."
Four hundred points sounds impressive until you remember the Dow has 30 stocks in it and some of them are worth more than small countries. Divide 400 by 30. That's 13 points per stock. Your nephew's lemonade stand had better margins last summer.
Wall Street scored a winning week. That's the headline. A winning week. Not a winning month. Not a winning quarter. A week. Five trading days. The financial equivalent of bragging that you went to the gym twice and didn't eat an entire pizza for dinner on Thursday.
The Nasdaq rose too, which means tech stocks went up after going down, a pattern so predictable you could set your watch to it if you were the kind of person who still wears a watch and also cares about the Nasdaq on a Friday.
Somewhere right now a guy named Brett is texting his college roommate about how he "called it" because he bought shares of something on Wednesday. Brett did not call it. Brett has never called anything. Brett once told people he was "early" on crypto in 2021.
The article says "live updates" like anything about this matters in real time. The Dow moved 400 points and by Monday it'll move 300 points the other direction and we'll get another headline about how Wall Street scored something else. A winning morning. A winning hour. A winning bathroom break.
Technical analysis says none of this means anything. The chart looks exactly the same as it did last month. Same support levels. Same resistance. Same retail traders drawing lines on their phones and pretending they've discovered fire.
Brett's roommate just texted back "nice bro." He's lying. He doesn't care. Nobody cares. The Dow went up 400 points and your portfolio is still red for the year.
Photo by Tyler Prahm on Unsplash
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