The financial media discovered something this week. The Federal Reserve holds meetings. They happen on a schedule. Someone wrote an article about it.
Consequential. That's the word they used. A Fed meeting is consequential the way a sunrise is consequential. It happens whether you watch it or not. The rate stays the same or it doesn't. Your portfolio dies either way.
The second big thing is conferences. A slew of them. Not one conference. Not several conferences. A slew. Executives will fly to hotels and talk about synergy while their stock prices do whatever they were going to do anyway. Retail traders will watch CNBC segments from these conferences and convince themselves they learned something actionable.
They didn't.
Here's what happens at a consequential Fed meeting. Jerome Powell sits down. He reads words someone else wrote. Journalists pretend to decode those words like they're the f*cking Rosetta Stone. Traders click buttons. The S&P moves one percent in a direction. Everyone explains why it moved that direction. If it moved the other direction, they would've explained that too.
The conferences are worse. CEOs show up and say quarterly earnings look strong. Or they say they're cautiously optimistic. Or they say they're navigating headwinds. Pick your cliché. Some guy named Derek who bought three shares of Tesla on Robinhood will tweet that he's bullish based on body language he observed in a clip.
Derek will lose money.
The article promises these are the two big things to watch. Not the three big things. Not the one big thing. Two. Precision matters when you're listing things that don't matter. The Fed will do what it does. Conferences will conference. Your technical indicators didn't care last week and they won't care this week.
But sure, watch the meetings. Take notes. Draw your trendlines through the press conference. Maybe this time the noise becomes signal and you finally crack the code everyone else missed for seventy years.
Photo by Tyler Prahm on Unsplash
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