Nearly 28 S&P 500 companies report earnings this week. JPMorgan Chase kicks things off. Netflix follows. Retail traders will study both with the intensity of rabbinical scholars and still buy at the top.
Earnings season. The two words that convince millions of people that staring at a conference call transcript will unlock some secret about where a stock goes next. It won't. The chart already knew. The chart always knew. But sure, parse Jamie Dimon's prepared remarks for hints about net interest margins like you're the Zodiac Killer decoding his own letters.
Netflix reports too. Subscribers up or down. Revenue beats or misses. Guidance raised or lowered. None of it matters because the stock moved three days ago when someone's cousin who works in data analytics saw a pattern in app downloads and told a guy at Citadel. You'll read about it Friday. You'll feel informed. You'll be wrong.
The playbook for earnings season never changes. CNBC will air graphics with green and red arrows. Analysts will adjust their price targets by seven percent in either direction to justify their existence. Reddit will declare that every miss is manipulation and every beat is a short squeeze. The stocks will do what they were going to do anyway because the institutions already positioned two weeks ago.
Twenty-eight companies. Twenty-eight opportunities to pretend that listening to a CFO read numbers in monotone will give you an edge over algorithms that read the 10-Q in four milliseconds and executed seventeen thousand trades before you finished Googling what EBITDA means.
JPMorgan will beat. Or miss. Netflix will beat. Or miss. Your account will be red either way because you bought calls on Tuesday after watching a TikTok from a teenager in his mom's basement who said the setup looked bullish. The chart said otherwise. The chart always does.
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