Trump signed a $70 billion immigration funding bill. This matters to your portfolio in the exact same way that your neighbor's lawn care budget does.
The package funds ICE and Border Protection through the end of his term. Retail traders immediately checked their charting software to see if this creates a bullish pennant for private prison stocks. It does not. It creates nothing. The chart looked the same before the signature as it did after. But sure, go ahead and buy calls on geo-political theater.
Months of delay preceded this. Months. As if the market was holding its breath waiting for bureaucrats to allocate funds for an agency that was going to get funded anyway. Your brokerage account didn't know about the delay. Your brokerage account doesn't read the news. Your brokerage account is a database entry that updates when you panic-sell at a loss.
Somewhere right now a day trader is drawing trend lines connecting this headline to his position in defense contractors. He's convinced he's found the edge. He's identified the catalyst. He's wrong, but he won't know that until his stop-loss triggers at 3:47 PM on a random Tuesday in July when nothing else happens.
The bill passed after months of negotiation. Translation: people argued about numbers until they got tired and signed a piece of paper. The S&P 500 moved 0.03% that day for completely unrelated reasons. But the trader with the trend lines will tell his Discord server he called it.
Seventy billion dollars sounds like a lot until you remember the government spending seventy billion dollars is like you spending seventy dollars. Except you have to actually earn the seventy dollars first.
Photo by Gautam Krishnan on Unsplash
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