Isaias killed four people and knocked out power to 670,000 customers across four states. Investors immediately checked if this affected their Robinhood positions. It did not. Their phones still worked.
Florida took the worst of it with 420,000 outages. Alabama got 190,000. Georgia managed 43,000. Mississippi rounded out the party with 17,000. PowerOutage.us tracked all of this in real time because apparently we need a firm dedicated to counting how many people can't run their air conditioners.
The storm made landfall and proceeded to do exactly what hurricanes do. Trees fell. Power lines snapped. Transformers exploded. None of this information helps you pick a stock. None of this tells you when to buy or sell. A hurricane hit the Southeast in August. Stunning meteorological development.
Four people died. That number won't move the market. The 670,000 without power won't move it either. Utility companies already priced in hurricane season when they filed their rate increases six months ago. The rebuild costs are passed to customers. The insurance payouts are capped. The executives still get their bonuses.
Retail traders spent Tuesday morning scanning their portfolios for hurricane plays. Home Depot exposure. Generator manufacturers. Roofing suppliers. They convinced themselves they could trade weather patterns. They could not. By Wednesday they were back to losing money on tech stocks like normal people.
The power came back on over the next week. It always does. The dead stayed dead. They always do. And somewhere a day trader with two shares of Duke Energy thought he nailed the disaster arbitrage because his account went up eleven dollars.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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