JPMorgan released its October stock picks. American Express, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Liberty Energy made the list. Retail traders will now pile into these names at precisely the wrong time.
The bank employs hundreds of analysts. They use discounted cash flow models and sector rotation strategies and proprietary data feeds. Then they tell you to buy a credit card company, a lab equipment maker, and an oilfield services firm. You could have thrown darts at a Bloomberg terminal and hit the same sectors.
American Express processes transactions for people who think airport lounge access is a personality trait. Thermo Fisher sells pipettes to pharmaceutical companies. Liberty Energy fracs wells in the Permian Basin. These are JPMorgan's best ideas. Not good ideas. Best ideas.
The report will get forwarded to every retail trading Discord by noon. Someone will screenshot it and add rocket emojis. By Monday, call options on all three names will be up 40% on volume. By Wednesday, those same calls will expire worthless. The cycle continues because nobody checks whether JPMorgan's August picks actually worked.
They won't. The picks never do. Banks publish these lists so their institutional clients can fade them while retail chases the headline. It's not a conspiracy. It's just how the game works when one side has a research budget and the other side has a Robinhood account funded by tips from waiting tables.
JPMorgan will publish new picks in November. Different names, same result. Retail will buy at the top, ride it down, then blame the market for being rigged. The market isn't rigged. You're just the product, not the customer.
But sure, load up on Liberty Energy because a bank that made $50 billion last year wants to help you get rich.
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