Natural disasters ramped up this month. Super El Niño gets the credit. Floods, droughts, storms. The usual suspects when ocean temperatures decide to f*ck around.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started googling "how to short weather." They found climate ETFs. They bought calls on umbrella manufacturers. One guy on Reddit claimed he was going long on sandbags because he "understood the cyclical nature of precipitation." His account is now worth twelve dollars.
The El Niño phenomenon happens every few years. Scientists predicted this one months ago. Did not matter. Everyone acted surprised when the hurricanes showed up on schedule like they had season tickets.
Financial media covered the disasters with their signature move: pretending catastrophic loss of life has a ticker symbol. CNBC ran a segment on commodity impacts. Bloomberg discussed supply chain disruptions. Nobody mentioned that your stock portfolio does not care if Kansas is underwater because corn futures already priced it in six weeks ago.
Here's what El Niño actually means for markets: absolutely nothing you could not have known in advance. Weather patterns affect agriculture. Agriculture affects food prices. Food prices affect inflation data. Inflation data gets released on a schedule. You either trade the schedule or you don't.
But some dipsh*t with a Robinhood account saw "worst natural disasters" and thought he discovered alpha. Bought disaster recovery stocks after the disasters already happened. Paid premium pricing for information every meteorologist had in February. Lost money in a market that literally tells you what it's going to do before it does it.
The technical setup remains unchanged. Support holds or it doesn't. Resistance breaks or it doesn't. Mother Nature does not move your stop loss.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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