It's a big club and you ain't in it: George CarlinThe big banks control the stock market via their trading desks. In order for their trading desks to make billions of dollars (GS made $4.6 billion profit in Q4 2020 for example), prices need to fluctuate.
While stocks get all the attention, the real drivers of market movements are the bond market gurus who provide the broad brush strokes of direction, typically based upon the release of economic data, comments made by the Fed Chairman etc, or major events.
Once the bond guys have dictated the direction of the wind, an elite handful of stock strategists meet around the conference room tables at JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America each day and interpret how the wind direction will affect various industries and specific companies. Out of those meetings come the stories for tomorrow.
From there, it is a simple matter of feeding the information to the eagerly waiting financial media who produce sound bites to their eagerly waiting viewers.
Events >> Bond desk >> stock trading desk >> financial media >> viewers
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guaranteed to work, until some event upsets the apple cart. When that happens, the process just gets rebooted.
The people on the trading desks have contacts that they work with every day. They reach out to their contacts on specific topics, get the trade or not, and then they move on to the next call. Unless something happens that upsets the apple cart, each day is planned and executed with little variation.
Hence, the reason you can see oil up a bit and yet oil stocks are down.