Mitch McConnell fell. Then he got pneumonia. Then he disappeared for a while. Then he came back and told everyone about it.
The longest-serving party leader in Senate history managed to keep this information under wraps long enough that people started asking questions. Which means his communications team executed a flawless strategy of saying absolutely nothing until they had no choice. Corporate crisis management at its finest.
Here's what retail traders need to understand: this has zero impact on your portfolio. None. Your calls expired worthless because you bought them three days before earnings with a Robinhood account funded by your Discover card cash advance. Not because an 81-year-old senator took a tumble and caught a respiratory infection.
But sure, let's pretend legislative leadership health updates move markets. Let's check the tape. SPY flat. QQQ flat. Even healthcare stocks didn't budge. Turns out the efficient market hypothesis works perfectly when the news is completely f*cking irrelevant to equity prices.
McConnell's office called it an "unexplained absence" which is an interesting way to describe falling down and getting sick. Unexplained. As if he vanished into a portal or got abducted by aliens instead of experiencing the two most common ailments for octogenarians.
Some trader right now is building a thesis connecting this to Fed policy. Drawing lines on a chart. Calculating the correlation between Senate leadership falls and the VIX. Typing "bullish" in a Discord channel with 47 members, 43 of whom are bots.
The man serves in the Senate, not the Federal Reserve Board. He doesn't set interest rates. He doesn't control liquidity. Your AMD shares are down because you bought them, not because someone's grandfather needed antibiotics.
Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash
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