Ford sold fewer cars in August than last year. Also sold fewer in July. And June. And May. And April. And March. And February. And January. Eight months straight. But the Super Duty truck production hit a twenty-year high.
The company recovered from supplier fires. Not a metaphor. Actual fires. Buildings burned. Production stopped. Then production restarted. Now they make more trucks than they did when Nickelback was good. Wait, scratch that. More trucks than they did when people pretended Nickelback was good.
Super Duty trucks are highly profitable. That's code for margins so fat you could charge them rent. Ford can lose sales volume eight months running and still print money because guys named Derek keep buying $80,000 trucks to haul a lawnmower twice a year.
The technical setup here is beautiful. Sales down, production up. Classic supply-demand mismatch. Retail traders see this headline and think buy the dip. They open their Robinhood app. They remember Ford trades at $11. They buy seventeen shares. They tell their brother-in-law they're building generational wealth.
Production hit a twenty-year high right as sales hit an eight-month low. That's not bullish. That's not bearish. That's just Ford being Ford. Making shit nobody's buying at a rate not seen since 2004. Somewhere a logistics manager is updating his resume while standing in front of a lot full of unsold F-350s.
The fires were real problems. The recovery is real too. The sales decline is also real. All three things can be true. But only one matters for the stock price and nobody knows which one until after the fact, which makes reading this headline about as useful as a weather forecast from last week.
Your move is to do nothing, but you won't, because doing nothing feels like losing.
Photo by Othman Alghanmi on Unsplash
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