The Nasdaq futures are tanking because South Korean stocks fell first. That's the reasoning. Not earnings. Not interest rates. Not because the Fed sneezed or a tech CEO sold shares to buy another yacht. Just contagion from a market 6,000 miles away that most retail traders couldn't locate on a map if you gave them three guesses and a globe.
The Club—Jim Cramer's subscription service where people pay for stock tips they could ignore for free on Twitter—has compiled ten things to watch. Ten. As if watching helps. As if staring at your Robinhood account while it bleeds red somehow constitutes a strategy.
South Korean stocks plunged. American stocks will follow. The connection between these two events exists entirely in the minds of people who need a narrative to explain random price movement. The chart doesn't care about Seoul. The chart doesn't read headlines. The chart is a series of numbers that go up and down based on who's buying and who's selling, and those people are mostly algorithms that don't know South Korea exists.
But sure. Blame Korea.
Retail traders will panic-sell at the open. They'll lock in losses. They'll post loss porn on Reddit for upvotes. They'll claim they're buying the dip while their account balance suggests otherwise. Then they'll subscribe to The Club because clearly the problem is they didn't have access to Jim Cramer's ten things to watch. That was the missing piece. Not risk management. Not position sizing. Not the fact that they bought NVDA at the top because someone on YouTube said it was going to $200.
The Nasdaq will open lower. It might close lower. It might rip higher by lunch because none of this means anything. The South Korean stocks will still be down. American stocks will do whatever they were going to do anyway.
By Wednesday, everyone will have forgotten Korea exists and moved on to blaming something else.
Photo by Tötös Ádám on Unsplash
Leave a Comment