Wildfires burned 300,000 acres across France and Spain. Temperatures are climbing to 95 degrees. Firefighters are trying to stop the fire from burning more things.
This is the part where someone on Twitter asks what this means for their tech stocks. Nothing. It means nothing. A forest burned down and you're checking if it moved the needle on your three shares of Tesla. The fire doesn't care about your portfolio. The fire doesn't know what a portfolio is.
Somewhere right now a day trader is Googling "wildfire stocks" and finding an ETF that tracks European timber futures. He's convinced this is his edge. He's wrong. He'll buy in Tuesday morning after watching a YouTube video titled "Why THIS Crisis Changes Everything." The video will be eleven minutes long because of ad placement. He'll lose money by Wednesday.
France and Spain are dealing with actual problems. Evacuations. Property damage. Air quality that makes breathing feel like a bad decision. Meanwhile retail traders are running Monte Carlo simulations on how this affects their September calls on a company that makes garden hoses.
The fire will burn until it stops burning. Temperatures will rise until they fall. None of this will show up in your trading journal as the reason you're down 40% this quarter. You'll blame algo traders or market manipulation or Mercury in retrograde. You won't blame the fact that you thought a wildfire in Europe was a trading signal.
95 degrees isn't even that hot, but when your country's infrastructure was built assuming the sun would remain polite, it becomes a problem. Sort of like how your brokerage account was built assuming you'd stop gambling, but here we are.
The real tragedy is 300,000 acres burned and someone's first thought was checking futures.
Photo by on Unsplash
Leave a Comment