Jay Woods looked at a chart. The chart had lines on it. The lines went up and down. Sometimes they crossed each other. Woods decided this meant something.
The chief market strategist at Freedom Capital Markets—a title that sounds like it was generated by a libertarian AI—broke down the technicals on a biotech stock. He did not name the biotech stock. He did not explain what the biotech company does. He did not mention if they cure cancer or just make slightly better foot cream. The lines looked attractive. That was enough.
Attractive is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Bollinger Bands were probably touching in a way that made Woods feel something. The MACD crossed over. The RSI hit a number between one and one hundred. The volume bars grew taller. Somewhere, a retail trader saw this clip and immediately opened Robinhood.
This is technical analysis. You ignore what a company makes. You ignore their earnings. You ignore whether their CEO was recently indicted. You stare at a candlestick chart until your brain invents a pattern. Then you tell people the pattern means buy.
Woods works at Freedom Capital Markets. Freedom Capital Markets is not Morgan Stanley. It is not Goldman Sachs. It is not even Jefferies. But Woods has a title and access to a television camera, so his opinion on whether a line looks pretty gets broadcast to thousands of people who will now make financial decisions based on whether Woods thought a triangle looked symmetrical enough.
The biotech stock was not named in the summary. This is because the specific stock does not matter. What matters is that Woods said the word technicals and gestured at a screen. What matters is that someone, somewhere, will buy shares of a company they cannot name because a man they have never met said the squiggly lines looked attractive.
The squiggly lines have never paid rent.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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