The inflation data comes out next week. The jobs report made everything confusing. Nobody knows what the Fed will do now.
Traders who learned economics from TikTok are refreshing their CPI explainer threads. They're highlighting passages. They're making flashcards. They're convinced this time they'll predict the market reaction before it happens. They won't.
Here's what actually matters: nothing in the jobs report changed the fact that your technical setup ignores macroeconomic data entirely. Support is support whether Jerome Powell cries or does a backflip. The 200-day moving average doesn't care about non-farm payrolls. It's a line on a chart. It has no feelings about employment.
But retail can't help themselves. They'll watch the CPI print. They'll read seventeen different analyst takes. They'll join a Discord where someone with 340 followers explains what it means for small caps. Then they'll open a position based on pure vibes and blame the Fed when it goes against them.
The stakes got higher, apparently. Higher than what? Higher than last month when the stakes were also described as high? Higher than the month before that? Every data release is the most important one ever until the next one comes out and retroactively demotes it.
Friday's report complicated the outlook. Love that phrase. Complicated. As if the outlook was simple before. As if anyone trading on monetary policy speculation has ever had a clear outlook on anything except their own liquidation.
The Fed will do whatever it does. The market will move however it moves. The inflation number will be whatever it is. And traders will continue to pretend they can front-run all of it by reading headlines harder than everyone else.
Next week someone will post their entire account balance on a CPI-direction bet and lose it in four minutes.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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