The major averages dropped for the fourth consecutive session Thursday. Treasury yields jumped. Oil prices climbed. Stocks went down.
None of this had anything to do with charts. The ten-year yield doesn't care that your moving average crossed over. Oil futures don't respect your trendline. The S&P 500 will not pause at your Fibonacci level just because you watched a YouTube video about sacred geometry in trading.
But here's what happened anyway. Retail traders opened their platforms Thursday night. They drew lines connecting Thursday's low to Wednesday's low. They extended those lines into Friday. They nodded solemnly. They set alerts. They prepared their entry points for the next session based on where two arbitrary price points intersected with their imagination.
Treasury yields moved because bond traders sold bonds. That's it. That's the whole mechanism. Yields go up when bond prices go down. Bond prices go down when people sell bonds. People sold bonds Thursday. Will they sell bonds Friday? Flip a coin. Your MACD histogram has the same predictive power as that coin, except the coin doesn't require a subscription to TradingView.
Oil prices jumped for reasons that will be explained sixteen different ways by sixteen different analysts, all of them certain, none of them profitable. Stocks fell because more people sold than bought at every price level until the market closed. They will either continue falling Friday or they won't.
The beautiful part is that someone with a daily chart and three indicators will claim they predicted it either way. They'll post their winning trade. They'll never post the four losing trades from the same week. They'll talk about discipline and risk management and reading price action.
Friday's big stock stories will be determined by what happens Friday, which makes this headline particularly worthless even by financial media standards.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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