Financial journalists decided next week matters. They wrote it down. They scheduled it. They assigned meaning to a calendar square that exists only because someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics clocks in on Fridays.
The jobs report will reveal whether AI can sustain its advance. Not whether AI works. Not whether companies make money from it. Whether the trade sustains. The trade. As if NVIDIA's stock price contains information about neural networks instead of information about how many idiots bought NVIDIA.
Retail traders are refreshing their portfolios right now. They're checking futures at 3am. They're reading analyst notes they don't understand while their kids eat cereal alone. They think next week will show them something. It will show them a number. Then another number. Then Jim Cramer will yell about both numbers. Then they'll lose money in a way that feels like they were paying attention.
The premise here is that artificial intelligence, a technology that either revolutionizes humanity or doesn't, hinges on whether 235,000 people got hired instead of 210,000. That non-farm payrolls will determine if machines can think. That the sustainability of a trade depends on Janet from HR finally filling that operations role in Scranton.
Technical analysis says the AI sector is overbought on the daily but forming a bull flag on the weekly. Means nothing. The chart is a Rorschach test where every pattern confirms what you already wanted to do. You were buying anyway. You were selling anyway. Now you have a flag to blame.
Next week will show how sustainable the AI trade is the same way a coin flip shows how sustainable gravity is.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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