The Dow jumped 470 points Friday. That's 1.8 percent. Your portfolio is still down for the year but congratulations on this momentous victory.
Treasury yields surged. Stocks went up anyway. The relationship between bonds and equities apparently took the week off. Nobody knows why anything happened but everyone will explain it to you with complete confidence Monday morning.
Wall Street called this a "volatile week." The S&P moved three percent peak to trough. Somewhere a day trader is telling his wife this was basically the Flash Crash and she should respect his bravery.
The headline says stocks notched a winning week. Notched. Like they're carving tallies into a bedpost. Like the market f*cked you so good you need to commemorate it.
Here's what happened: numbers went up, then down, then up again. Treasury yields did their thing. Algos detected momentum. Retail piled in at 3:55 PM Friday to chase the rip. The usual.
Technical analysts drew lines on charts. The lines predicted this exact move. Also the opposite move. Also a sideways move. Depends which line you squint at.
Some guy on financial television said the yield surge was "rippling through markets." Rippling. Water ripples. Markets just spasm randomly while guys in ties pretend causation exists.
You know what else notched a winning week? The casino down the street. Same business model, worse coffee.
The Dow components are thirty companies selected by a committee using criteria they definitely didn't make up on the spot. This basket of arbitrary stocks moved 470 points and grown adults are writing articles about what it means for your future.
Next week Treasury yields will do something else and stocks will react by doing whatever they were going to do anyway and someone will explain the connection like they predicted it all along and you'll believe them because you need this to make sense.
It doesn't.
Photo by Oren Elbaz on Unsplash
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