Wall Street got back to its winning ways last week. That's the headline. Winning ways. As if the market had temporarily misplaced its car keys and found them in the couch cushions.
The Fed made a decision. Big Tech posted earnings. These two things happened in the same week and someone decided that caused volatility. Causation established through proximity. Bulletproof.
Jerome Powell opened his mouth. Numbers came out. Traders who've been wrong about rate cuts for eighteen consecutive months nodded sagely and adjusted their portfolios based on this fresh information they definitely understood. Then Microsoft and Apple reported quarterly numbers that were predetermined weeks ago but somehow constituted breaking news on announcement day.
The market went up. Then down. Then up again. Volatile. Except the S&P ended the week higher than it started, which in any other context we'd call "went up" but in financial media means we get to use the word volatile six times and pretend we witnessed history.
Retail traders spent the week parsing Powell's semicolons for hidden messages about September. They found them. They always do. The message changes based on whether their calls expired worthless, but they find it.
Big Tech earnings beat expectations that were carefully managed downward for precisely this outcome. Everyone acted surprised. The stock prices moved in directions that technical analysts will now explain were obvious in retrospect. The patterns were right there. You just had to know which pattern to ignore.
None of this mattered. The market was going to do whatever it did regardless of whether Powell blinked twice or Satya Nadella used the word AI forty times instead of thirty-nine. But we got our volatile week. We got our Fed decision coverage. We got our Big Tech earnings drama.
Wall Street's winning ways are back, which implies they left, which implies someone can tell the f*cking difference.
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