 everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stock Swoosh. And today I wanted to talk to you about inflation. Now, while I'm not one of those people that makes trading decisions based on fundamentals, in fact, I make trading decisions based on technical analysis. What is technical analysis? Technical analysis is looking at past price data to predict future price data. Why? Because if you know where somebody's going to go in the future, you could enter the trade now and then make money, whether the stock gets bought or sells off. So that's why I believe that technical analysis really is the right thing to be watching, specifically in gaps, which is what I do. But I am aware of inflation, obviously, as a consumer. And I live in the United States and I live in New York and I do speak on television about these topics. So sometimes I have to talk about the economy and inflation. So I give my thoughts on it. And I think that people love fundamentals. Even the people that follow technicals tend to love fundamentals and they like it when the fundamentals match up with the technicals. The danger of following fundamentals is if you're so, what's the word, influenced by the fundamentals that you misinterpret or misread the chart so the technical analysis, then you can screw up in a trade. So I'm fine if you want to follow fundamentals, if it helps you with a technical aspect of it to get the conviction of confidence to do the trade or stay with it. But if they don't match up, you better be careful. You better be careful. We've had good economic data in the market so long. We've had bad economic data and in the market rally. So sometimes it doesn't make any sense. But I do want to talk specifically in this conversation even though I'll talk more about technical analysis versus fundamental analysis another time but I do want to talk a little bit today about inflation because I found something online here. I just want to pull this up that I just want to read. Because everyone's talking about inflation and inflation is bad, which I happen to agree with. What is inflation? That's basically when prices are rising. Okay, so you're paying more for things than you did in the past. Could be food, could be gas, could be housing, could be lumber, a cost of many things have been going up recently. And this is again, we're in 2021. But anyways, I saw something online today that said inflation is good. So I just wanted to read this. When the economy is not running that capacity, meaning, which it's not right now, it's not right now, okay? Meaning there is unused labor resources. Inflation theoretically helps increase production. Now I didn't write this, I found this online. And it's an argument for when inflation is good. Let me just finish. More dollars translates to more spending which equates to more aggregated demand. More demand in turn triggers more production to meet that demand. Now normally that might be the case. Normally, but it's not right now. Why? Because, let me just read that one part again here. More demand in turn triggers more production. The problem with that is, when we have the demand, so we're having the inflation and we're having the demand, but guess what? It's not triggering more production because people don't want to come back to work. People don't want to come back to work. Not everyone is open, fully. And people are choosing not to come back to work. Why? Because of the stimulus. Because of the government stimulus. Some people are making more money at home living off of stimulus, living off of the government than they are going back to work. And some people are afraid still to get COVID so they don't want to go to work. So maybe they're making slightly less or the same living off of stimulus as they would at work. And again, it depends on the different industry that it happens to be. So normally this statement, again, I found this online, normally you could say, well, that's an argument that inflation is good, not that inflation is bad because eventually it would stimulate more production and thriving in the economy. And so you'd have a short-term inflation rise and then it would drop off after more production is going up and things are going normal. But the problem is that's not the reason we have the inflation. We have the inflation right now. Okay, well, we have the inflation right now for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons that we have a problem right now where we have more demand is and the lack of production is that people simply are choosing not to come back to work. And that is a problem. That is a problem that I don't know how it's gonna get resolved until everybody realizes that in fact is a problem that needs a resolution because today, so far, the government hasn't come to terms with the fact that that's even a reality. Now, many business owners, particularly here in New York, depending on the industry or business, have come to that reality and it's a problem, it's a struggle. And again, not every industry is open 100% and until the economy is back open and people are back at work, we're probably going to have this continued inflationary period and I don't know how long it lasts. And until it's fixed, where the stimulus ends, okay, where we stop paying people not to go to work, I think there's gonna be a problem. Initially at the outset, I mean, it sounded like a great idea and it definitely helped people because people were forced to stay home out of no choice but they're run with the government shut down. We can argue about that all day long but the reality is, here we are, it's past 12 months since we shut down, we're getting into the summer of 2021, prices are going up and again, it's the vacation time for people. So prices are going up in gas, for example, when people are driving around where they were gonna spend more money on gas to drive on vacations, and again, it all comes out of people's pocketbooks. So I just wanted to talk about it because I saw that online and I wanted to make that statement and that's my thoughts on that. Again, I make trading decisions based on technical analysis, not fundamentals but if the technicals match up with the fundamentals that very often gives people a high level of conviction to trade. For me, again, it's just information that I have where I make my own choices and I have my own opinions about these types of things, like I said. Overall, I think inflation is bad for the economy and in the instance that I described, it potentially could be good if it's short-term and doesn't last and increases production but that's not the reason that we're having the inflation now and I don't think we're gonna have some of these problems fixed until the government stimulus goes away. Thanks everyone, have a great day.