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Notes -
I think there's a lot of bad storytelling around the stock market in general.
I sometimes listen to the Wall Street Journal's Minute Briefing, and they always mention how the market did that day, and give an explanation for why it went up or down.
Their explanation is always plausible, but my basic issue is that if the stock market is generally just on a random walk, and you always grasp for the nearest plausible explanation, you're going to be completely wrong about why the market was up or down in a given day a lot of the time. Like, in the world where the market had gone slightly down, instead of slightly up and more or less the same news items had happened that day, how much does that change how they tell the story that day?
It’s not on a random walk, I think the issue is that the markets themselves are ahead of the news. To be blunt, by the time a market-pushing force becomes general public news, it’s long since been priced in. The people making a living from stocks are generally aware of what’s going on in the world from private sources— global intelligence agencies, government sources, knowing the players and the playbooks. I’d watch the markets to time the end of the shutdown rather than the opposite.
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To begin with, explaining market reaction is a less credible version of divination. Even things that should have a straightforward effect up or down are polluted by second, third, fourth, nth-order reasoning of frontrunning the reaction and frontrunning the frontrunners and turning positive news into a negative if it's not AS positive as the frontrunners assumed (or vice-versa), and etc...
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