Nvidia reports earnings this week. Retail traders will stare at their screens. They will watch the number go up or down. Then they will check their charts to explain why the number went up or down. The charts did not predict the number. The charts never predict the number. But the charts make them feel like they're doing research.
Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole speech. Jackson Hole is where central bankers fly to Wyoming to read prepared remarks about inflation while standing near mountains. The mountains do not care about inflation. The central bankers do not care about the mountains. Everyone pretends this is where policy gets made. Policy gets made in conference rooms in Washington. But conference rooms don't photograph well.
Here's what will happen. Nvidia beats or misses. The stock moves. Then some guy named Derek who watches YouTube videos about RSI divergence will post that he "called it" because his moving average crossed another moving average three days ago. Derek did not call it. Derek refreshed his brokerage app forty times waiting to see which direction to claim he predicted.
Warsh says something about data-dependent policy. Traders parse every word for hidden meaning. There is no hidden meaning. He's reading words that twelve people edited to ensure no actionable meaning survives the approval process. But CNBC will run a segment called "Decoding Warsh" where three people in split-screen pretend the phrase "monitoring conditions" contains alpha.
The beautiful part is none of this requires charts. You could trade both events by reading headlines and flipping a coin. But retail traders will spend eighteen hours this week drawing trendlines on the five-minute chart. They will move their stop loss six times. They will post their entry with the caption "high conviction play." Then they will delete the post Thursday.
Two events. Zero technical signals. Infinite cope about why the Fibonacci retracement didn't hold.
Photo by Tyler Prahm on Unsplash
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