The May inflation numbers drop Wednesday morning. Wall Street expects 4.2% annual inflation. Economists polled each other. They agreed on a number. Now we wait to see if the other number matches their number.
Here's what happens next: the number comes out, traders pretend it matters for six minutes, algos move the market in whichever direction makes the most retail accounts blow up, and by Thursday everyone's back to buying whatever Jim Cramer told them not to buy.
The "consensus" is the financial media's way of saying "we called twelve guys who get paid whether they're right or wrong and averaged their guesses." One of them probably used a dartboard. Another definitely just added 0.3% to last month and called it research. The third was on his second bourbon and said a number that sounded confident.
If inflation comes in at 4.2%, the headline will read "Inflation Meets Expectations, Markets Digest Data." If it's 4.3%, you'll see "Inflation Runs Hot, Fed Concerns Mount." If it's 4.1%, prepare for "Cooling Inflation Signals Soft Landing Hopes." Three different narratives. Same charts. Same technical levels. Same support and resistance zones that were there last Tuesday when none of this f*cking mattered.
Somewhere right now a day trader is setting an alarm for 8:29 AM because he thinks getting the number one minute early will give him an edge. He'll be competing against machines that processed the data, executed seventeen thousand trades, and moved on to the next meaningless catalyst before his browser refreshed.
Wednesday morning the number prints, talking heads explain what it means, and by Wednesday afternoon the market's moving on something else entirely—probably a Fed speaker saying the same thing every Fed speaker has said since 2009.
The best part? Nobody's buying less groceries if it comes in at 4.1% instead of 4.2%, but someone's definitely losing their rent money on a 0-DTE call.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
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