Stock futures are little changed. The S&P 500 posted a three-week win streak. The market remains near all-time highs. This is what passes for news now.
Three weeks. That's the timeframe retail traders use to validate their entire investment thesis. Your portfolio went up for fifteen consecutive trading days and you've already mentally spent the lake house money. You're googling compound interest calculators at 2 AM. You're texting your brother-in-law about early retirement.
The headline says "little changed" like it's describing market conditions. It's not. It's describing your net worth after commissions. Futures moved eight basis points while you slept and CNBC sent a push notification about it. Breaking news: numbers exist in a narrow range. Film at eleven.
Near all-time highs means the same thing it meant in 2021 before the market dropped twenty percent. It meant the same thing in 2007 before it dropped fifty percent. It meant the same thing in 1999 before the Nasdaq lost seventy-eight percent. But sure, this time the little changed futures are definitely a leading indicator of your financial genius.
Technical analysts don't care about win streaks. A three-week rally on declining volume is a bull trap. A three-week rally on expanding volume is distribution. A three-week rally on unchanged volume is a reason to check if the data feed is broken. None of this matters because you're trading options based on a headline that contains the phrase "live updates."
The market goes up. The market goes down. Sometimes it does neither and a journalist still has to file eight hundred words before lunch. You read those words and decided they meant something. That's the real headline.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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