A nor'easter hit the Northeast this weekend. Tens of millions of people lost power. At least one person died. Coastal flooding destroyed property up and down the seaboard from the mid-Atlantic through New England.
None of this affects your trading strategy. The storm doesn't care about your Tesla calls. The wind didn't check the Fed's balance sheet before it ripped someone's roof off.
But you know what happened. Some guy named Derek sat in his darkened apartment Saturday night, phone at 8% battery, using his last bar of service to check if the nor'easter was priced in. He pulled up his brokerage app. He squinted at his positions. He wondered if Home Depot would gap up Monday because people need plywood.
Derek's neighbor was evacuating. Water was coming through the first floor. Derek was calculating whether to buy LEAPs on generator manufacturers.
The storm doesn't have a ticker symbol. It doesn't report earnings. You can't short it. You can't buy the dip on sustained winds of 65 miles per hour. There's no technical pattern that predicts storm surge. No moving average that tells you when to evacuate.
Millions of people spent the weekend in the path of a massive weather system that forecasters tracked for days. They prepared. They evacuated. They helped their neighbors. They did the intelligent thing that people do when nature reminds them that most of what we worry about doesn't matter.
Then there's you. You're reading this on your phone. You're wondering if infrastructure stocks will pop. You're thinking about whether this creates a buying opportunity in utilities. You're doing the mental gymnastics to turn human suffering into a trade setup.
The storm killed someone and you're looking for an edge.
Photo by Zain Creations on Unsplash
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