Stock futures are flat. Treasury yields surged. Jobs report came in weak. The Fed will release minutes nobody will read.
This is what passes for news now. Four things happened in the same week and financial journalists tied them together with yarn and called it a narrative. Stocks didn't move because of yields. They didn't move because that's what stocks do most of the time. They sit there. Like a cat. Staring at nothing.
The jobs report was surprisingly weak, which apparently eased concerns about another rate hike. Got that? Bad news is good news because it means the Fed might stop doing the thing everyone spent two years begging them to do. This logic would get you committed if you used it anywhere else in life. Your car broke down? Great news, now you don't have to worry about getting gas.
Investors are grappling. That's the verb they went with. Grappling. Like they're in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu match with a ten-year Treasury note. They're not grappling. They're sitting in front of a Bloomberg terminal eating a yogurt parfait waiting for someone to tell them what to think.
The Fed minutes will drop and retail traders will read them like they're decoding the Rosetta Stone. They'll highlight phrases. They'll parse the language for clues about pivot timing. They'll create threads with 47 tweets breaking down the use of the word "elevated" versus "persistent." Then futures will move 0.02% and some guy named Derek will tweet that he called it.
Futures are flat because nothing happened. Nothing will happen. The minutes will say the Fed is data-dependent, which means they have no f*cking idea what they're doing either, and everyone will pretend this was worth awaiting.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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