Peggy Flanagan and Angie Craig are fighting for Tina Smith's Senate seat. One is progressive. One is moderate. The difference will matter for approximately six weeks until whoever wins votes exactly the same way on every single bill.
Retail traders will study this primary like it contains market-moving information. They will read policy papers. They will compare voting records. They will construct elaborate theories about which candidate is better for clean energy stocks or healthcare ETFs or whatever sector they're about to lose money in.
None of this will help them. The S&P 500 does not care if Minnesota elects a progressive or a moderate. It does not care about Minnesota at all. Minnesota could sink into Lake Superior tomorrow and the only price movement would be in Hormel stock.
But some guy named Derek will absolutely convince himself that Angie Craig's stance on corporate tax rates is the missing piece of his trading strategy. He will buy options based on polling data. He will set alerts for debate schedules. He will join a Discord server dedicated to parsing the investment implications of Minnesota's Senate primary.
Derek will lose money in ways that have nothing to do with any of this. But he will blame the primary outcome anyway.
The technical pattern here is simple. Two candidates enter. One candidate wins. The market opens the next day and continues not giving a f*ck about who represents Minnesota in the Senate. Retail traders lose money. The cycle repeats in Wisconsin.
Smith is retiring after one of the most forgettable Senate careers in recent memory, which in fairness describes about eighty-seven current senators.
Flanagan and Craig will spend millions of dollars to win a job that pays $174,000 a year, which is the kind of return on investment Derek would actually understand.
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