Stocks are headed for a strong open Monday. This means nothing. The market opens strong every third Monday when retail traders convince themselves they've cracked the code by watching futures at 6 AM.
Meta got a price target boost from Wells Fargo. An analyst at a bank that opened millions of fake accounts to hit sales quotas now thinks Facebook should be worth more money. The same Wells Fargo that paid $3 billion in fines for fraud. That Wells Fargo.
Price targets are astrology for people who own Bloomberg terminals. Some guy in a midtown office changes a number in a spreadsheet from $520 to $580 and CNBC acts like the Burning Bush spoke. Meta's stock doesn't care. It will do whatever it was going to do anyway.
The top 10 things to watch. Not 8 things. Not 12 things. Exactly 10. Because financial media operates on the same editorial calendar as BuzzFeed in 2014. Ten is the magic number that makes retail traders click while their Robinhood account bleeds out from holding 0DTE calls they bought based on a Reddit comment.
Monday's strong open will be followed by Tuesday's concern about inflation data, Wednesday's optimism about rate cuts, Thursday's fear about geopolitical tensions, and Friday's relief that the week is over. None of it matters. The chart already knows where it's going.
Meta could announce they're pivoting to selling timeshares in the metaverse and the Wells Fargo analyst would raise the price target to $650. Banks don't issue price target cuts on companies they want to do investment banking deals with. Funny how that works.
Your neighbor who bought Meta shares because Wells Fargo said to will be underwater by Wednesday, refreshing his portfolio app every eleven seconds, wondering why the analyst's "high conviction buy" feels a lot like his high school girlfriend telling him she just needs space.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
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