Jobs week arrives. Nike reports earnings. A breakup finalizes. Financial media pretends any of this matters to your portfolio.
The jobs report drops Friday. Retail traders will spend the week refreshing their feeds, convinced they'll front-run the number. They won't. Algos parsed the ADP data before you finished reading the headline. Your edge is a participation trophy.
Nike's earnings are pivotal, apparently. Pivotal for whom? Not you. The institutional money already knows if teens are buying Air Maxes or whatever the f*ck kids wear now. You'll read the release six seconds after it hits, place your bet, and watch the stock move the opposite direction because guidance mentioned currency headwinds in Southeast Asia and you didn't even know Nike sold shoes in Southeast Asia.
Then there's the long-awaited breakup. Doesn't say which one. Doesn't matter. Could be a corporate spinoff. Could be a SPAC unwinding. Could be two companies realizing they hate each other after a merger that some banker promised would create synergies. Synergies never exist. They're the financial equivalent of saying a relationship will work because you both like pizza.
The article promises these are big things. Big for whom? CNBC needs to fill eight hours of airtime between commercials for online brokers that make it too easy for you to lose money. They'll discuss the jobs number with six people in split-screen who all agree it's important but can't agree on what it means. They'll show a chart of Nike's stock with lines on it. The lines mean nothing. A technical analyst drew them last week and they've already been invalidated twice.
Here's what actually happens: the market moves based on factors nobody mentioned, your stops get hit, and next week financial media will give you three new big things to obsess over while your account bleeds out in unrealized losses.
Photo by Nick Chong on Unsplash
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