Stock futures are mixed. This means absolutely nothing. The S&P 500 posted a three-week win streak, which is the financial equivalent of flipping heads three times in a row and declaring yourself a coin-flipping savant.
Retail traders are currently scanning their screens for patterns. They will find them. The human brain is designed to see faces in toast and meaning in random price movements. Three weeks up must mean something, they think. It doesn't.
The market sits near all-time highs, a phrase that appears in financial headlines roughly 40% of the time because markets go up. They have gone up for a century. Pointing this out is like announcing that the sun rose this morning and speculating about what it means for solar panel stocks.
Futures are mixed because some contracts are up and others are down, a condition that exists during every single trading session in recorded history. CNBC needed a headline. They got one. You clicked it. The system works.
Technical analysts are drawing lines on charts right now, connecting the three-week rally to fibonacci retracements and resistance levels that were invented by a guy in the 1970s who needed to sell newsletter subscriptions. The lines mean nothing. The levels mean nothing. The analysis means nothing.
Someone in a reddit thread is explaining why this three-week streak confirms their thesis about a market top. Someone else is explaining why it confirms a breakout to new highs. They are both wrong, but only one of them will remember being wrong.
The market will open. It will move. Financial journalists will explain why it moved. They will mention the three-week streak as if it caused something. It didn't cause anything. It was three weeks where stocks went up, probably because more people bought than sold, a tautology so perfect it should be embroidered on throw pillows.
Your portfolio is not a story. It's a series of random walks that occasionally trends upward if you wait long enough and don't do anything stupid, which you will.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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