The stock market watches two things this week. Earnings from four companies nobody can name without checking their portfolio app. Jobs data that will be revised three times before anyone notices.
This is what passes for actionable intelligence now. Four earnings reports. Not three. Not five. Four. The specificity suggests precision. The precision suggests someone did math. The math will be wrong by Tuesday.
Jobs data drops throughout the week. Multiple reports. Each one measuring employment from a different angle using numbers collected by people who haven't held a private sector job since 1987. Retail traders will read the headlines. Interpret the revisions as conspiracy. Buy calls anyway.
The Club holdings report. That's the actual phrase. Club holdings. Like you're in on something. Like there's a secret handshake and a password and Jim Cramer at the door checking membership cards. You're not in a club. You're reading free content on the internet while sitting on a toilet.
These are the two big things. Not one big thing. Not three medium things. Two big things. Earnings and jobs. The same two categories that have mattered every single week since markets were invented. But this week they're special. This week someone wrote a headline about them.
Technical analysts don't watch earnings. We don't watch jobs data. We watch lines on a chart that were drawn by an algorithm that doesn't know what a job is. The lines go up. The lines go down. Sometimes they go sideways and we pretend that means something.
Four companies report. Millions of people will trade based on whether the made-up estimate was beaten by the made-up actual number. The jobs report will print. Economists will explain why it means exactly what they predicted. Then they'll explain why the revision means the opposite. Then they'll get quoted in next week's preview about the two big things to watch.
The wheel turns. The club meets. Your portfolio bleeds.
Photo by Tyler Prahm on Unsplash
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