Trump called Putin. Trump called Zelenskyy. Ukraine bombed some Russian targets. Russia bombed Kyiv. Markets are apparently "on alert" which is what we call it when traders pretend geopolitical phone calls have a predictable effect on their positions.
The headline says markets are watching. Wrong. Markets don't watch anything. Markets price in what happened yesterday and call it forward guidance. Some guy in Connecticut who bought leveraged SPY calls three weeks ago is now pretending he understands the diplomatic implications of a phone conversation between two men who've built careers on saying one thing and doing another.
Ukraine struck Russian targets. Russia struck Kyiv. This has been happening for years. But today it matters because Trump made some calls and someone at Bloomberg decided that was the variable that turns military conflict into actionable market intelligence. The S&P moved twelve points. Half the financial press wrote it up as volatility. The other half blamed algorithms.
Traders are checking the VIX like it's a mood ring for Eastern European diplomacy. They're setting alerts on crude oil futures as if Putin's next move depends on whether WTI closes above seventy dollars. They're drawing trendlines on defense contractor stocks and calling it analysis. None of this changes the fact that they have no idea what happens next and neither does anyone else.
The calls happened. The strikes happened. The barrage happened. Markets noticed the same way a dog notices a doorbell on TV. A lot of head-tilting. No actual comprehension. Just the feeling that something important occurred and maybe they should bark about it.
Your stop loss doesn't care about Trump's foreign policy or which city got hit overnight.
Photo by Eugenia Pan'kiv on Unsplash
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