India's retail inflation hit 5.54% in September. Economists predicted lower. They were wrong. Happens a lot in that profession. Meteorologists get more grief for being right 70% of the time.
This marks the eleventh straight month of rising inflation. Eleven months. That's almost a full year of prices going up while some guy named Raj on Twitter kept insisting his technical indicators showed deflation coming any day now. He drew triangles on a chart. Very convincing triangles.
The Reserve Bank of India will probably hike rates again. This is what central banks do when inflation exists. They make borrowing more expensive so people stop buying things. Revolutionary stuff. Really outside-the-box thinking from the folks who definitely saw this coming eleven months ago.
Retail traders in Mumbai are currently panic-selling their positions because a number went up. They'll panic-buy them back tomorrow when another number goes down. Then they'll check their portfolio and wonder why compounding hasn't made them rich yet. It's been three weeks.
The technical setup here is crystal clear. India has inflation. India had inflation last month. India will have inflation next month. You could've learned this by walking into any store and noticing prices were higher. But that would require leaving the house instead of staring at candlestick patterns that look like your portfolio: red and pointing the wrong direction.
Central banks hiking rates has never affected whether a stock goes up or down in any way that a retail trader could profitably predict before the move happens. But it makes for great headlines. Gets people clicking. Gets them trading. Gets them poor.
The RBI meets next month to decide how much to punish borrowers for the crime of wanting to borrow money during inflation. Smart money already priced this in. Dumb money is still Googling what RBI stands for.
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