August kicks off with a jobs report and earnings releases. The stock market recovered this week. Momentum has upside. Challenges lie ahead.
That's the headline. Read it three times and you still know nothing. Jobs report could show anything. Earnings could beat or miss. Momentum could reverse Tuesday. Challenges could mean rate hikes or a meteor strike or someone's vague feeling about Q4.
This is financial journalism's greatest trick. String together five nouns that sound important. Add "recovers" so it feels bullish. Throw in "challenges ahead" so you're covered when it tanks. You've now written something that cannot be wrong because it said absolutely nothing.
Retail traders will read this headline and think they've learned something. They'll check their portfolios. They'll move money around. They'll tell their brother-in-law about momentum at the barbecue. None of them will notice the article contains zero actionable information, zero specific predictions, and zero reason to exist.
The jobs report comes out. Number goes up or number goes down. Talking heads explain why they predicted it all along. Earnings season rolls through. Some companies beat, some miss, all of them guided lower while buying back stock. Momentum continues or it doesn't. Challenges remain ahead because challenges are always ahead. That's what makes them challenges instead of solutions.
Next week retail checks their account. Sees red. Wonders what happened to the momentum recovery. Scrolls back through headlines looking for where it went wrong. Finds another article explaining that challenges materialized faster than expected. Believes that one too.
The cycle continues because the content never stops and neither does the losing.
Photo by Matilda Alloway on Unsplash
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