“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”
Get your Free
financial review
This particular commentary has been some 35 years’ practical experience in the making. After reading it and taking its message to heart, a number of good things may slowly start to happen to you. Hours of time each week will be freed up for you to put to more productive use. You will think more clearly about the world around you. You will save money, alongside all that time. You will become less anxious. You will also become far happier. You may even become a better investor for it.
We are making the strongest case we can for you to
Stop consuming news
Here is the pitch from the mainstream media:
“Every weekday morning, I want you to listen to me for at least half an hour. I will speak to you, and you will just have to listen. I will give you information about a random series of events that in many cases will be disasters. Some of them – many of them – will make no sense whatsoever. I will determine the priority of these events, which will be highly subjective. I will give you little or no context, just an easy narrative – a tiny little nugget of a story, each time. I will not pay you for your time, but then again I will ask nothing from you in return – other than the implicit right to monetise your attention.
“I will then ask you to listen to me at intervals throughout the day. I will continue to share with you a madcap jumble of incidents, a hellish number of which will be excruciatingly dull political announcements. Most of this information will have nothing to do with you, but I will try and make you feel as if somehow you are responsible for all of it.
“I will then ask you to repeat this routine every day for 10, 20, 30 years – for your entire life, in fact.
“I am the news cycle. Will you be my friend ?”
Suspicions about the news business set in early for this correspondent. At school, we were in the year below a person who has attained some fame, if not outright notoriety, as the stand-up comedian and author Stewart Lee. January 1986 brought the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. On the day of the disaster, like many people, we saw (or allowed ourself to see) the video clips of the explosion replayed at least thirty or forty times. We remember Stewart’s commentary for that day, pinned to the Sixth Form Centre wall:
“Tasteless shuttle coverage suggests: don’t be a journalist, kids.”
But this correspondent wanted to be a journalist. So we were thrilled to get a subsequent internship at the Daily Express. We were less thrilled by our first mission: “Who do you know that’s famous ? Go off and get an interview.”
Our first experiences of journalism were all disillusioning. Which is perhaps why this correspondent’s first professional gig ended up being a bond salesman instead. Disillusioning, but in a far more expansive and educational way.
Entering The Shallows
Nicholas Carr, in his book ‘The Shallows’, makes a convincing case for the fact that the internet changes the way we think, read and remember. The internet literally changes our brain while we use it. He cites Marshall McLuhan’s earlier ‘Understanding Media’ which warned, an astonishing 30 years before the first web browser would even be launched, that
“The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which [our] way of life was formed.”
For McLuhan, the medium was and is the message. And we are almost powerless to resist.
The internet offers a feast of news,
“one course after another, each juicier than the last, with hardly a moment to catch our breath between bites. As networked computers have shrunk to the size of iPhones and BlackBerrys, the feast has become a moveable one, available anytime, anywhere. It’s in our home, our office, our car, our classroom, our purse, our pocket.”
There is no escape.
The Swiss author and businessman Rolf Dobelli suggests that what sugar is to the body, news is to the mind.
In the West, we have started to adapt to a world in which carbohydrates are not in short supply. Failure to adapt means either obesity or diabetes or some other form of physical illness through overconsumption.
But we have so far singularly failed to adapt to a world where news is not some kind of informational imperative, but rather a gigantic distraction from the pursuit of a full life.
“Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-coloured candies for the mind.”
Here, then, are the reasons for adopting a ‘news diet’:
News misleads us systematically
In the words of the stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius,
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
Acknowledging the inevitable imperfection of any service claiming to be offering “truth” is the first step toward freeing yourself from the digital tentacles of the news media.
Our brains are not well adapted for the vagaries of the modern world. We are essentially configured to pay attention to large, showy, noisy stimuli – hence the news media’s focus on images and graphics. We are not best placed to spend our attention on the small, abstract or complex. The news is about grabbing our attention, if only for a matter of seconds. Stories that are by definition more complicated get drowned out.
News is irrelevant
If you are a typical person, chances are that over the last 12 months you’ve consumed something like 10,000 news stories. Can you identify one which has enabled you to make a better decision about any aspect of your life ?
The consumption of news is irrelevant to what really matters to you. At best it will be entertaining, but it will almost always be irrelevant.
The news parades what is new when what is relevant is the real prize. But what tends to become relevant is almost by definition a slow-burn process. It takes time and effort, which the news media can ill afford to expend.
News doesn’t expand our understanding of things – it constrains it
Dobelli argues that news has no explanatory power. News items are simply “little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.”
But in the cause of craving a narrative and then believing what we’re given, we fool ourselves into accepting an overly simplistic causal account of why things happen in the news cycle.
Financial news is not exempt.
Thomas Schuster of Leipzig University has written a devastating account of how the financial news media consistently offer their customers a contrived, half-baked mess of spurious causality:
“The media select, they interpret, they emotionalize and they create facts. The media not only reduce reality by lowering information density. They focus reality by accumulating information where ‘actually’ none exists. A typical stock market report looks like this: Stock X increased because… Index Y crashed due to… Prices Z continue to rise after… Most of these explanations are post-hoc rationalizations. An artificial logic is created, based on a simplistic understanding of the markets, which implies that there are simple explanations for most price movements; that price movements follow rules which then lead to systematic patterns; and of course that the news disseminated by the media decisively contribute to the emergence of price movements.”
(From Thomas Schuster, ‘Meta-Communication and Market Dynamics; Reflexive Interactions of Financial Markets and the Mass Media’.)
At which point you might fairly ask: so how do I keep track of my stock portfolio if I’m not supposed to consume even financial news ?
Perhaps you shouldn’t. Not slavishly follow it on a daily basis, at any rate. Either way, although we don’t exactly subscribe to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, we would concede that for a short-form encapsulation of all information about a given security, it’s hard to beat the simple characteristic of its price.
Even here the seemingly objective value of news media is not wholly apparent. The psychologist Paul Andreassen showed that people who receive frequent news updates on their investments earn lower returns than those who get no news:
“The barrage of information and pseudo-information has been magnified by the explosion in financial news over the past decade. In the late 1980s, psychologist Paul B. Andreassen did a series of experiments with business students at MIT that showed that more news does not necessarily translate into better information. Andreassen divided students into two groups. Each group selected a portfolio of stocks and knew enough about each stock to come up with what seemed like a fair price for it. Then Andreassen allowed one group to see only the changes in the prices of its stocks. Students in that group could buy and sell if they wanted, but all they knew was whether the price of a stock had gone up or down. The second group was allowed to see the changes in price and was also given a constant stream of financial news that supposedly explained what was happening with each stock. Surprisingly, the less-informed group did far better than the group that was given all the news.
“The reason, Andreassen suggested, was that news reports tend to overplay the importance of any particular piece of information. When a stock fell, its fall was typically portrayed as a sign that further trouble lay in wait, while a stock that was on the rise seemed to promise nothing but blue skies ahead. As a result, the students who had access to the news overreacted. Because they took each piece of information as excessively meaningful, they bought and sold far more frequently than the people who were just looking at the price.”
(From Fast Company, 30 November 2002 – http://www.fastcompany.com/45655/too-much-information.)
News is harmful to your body
The news is a barrage of information continually hammering at your limbic system. ‘Bad’ news triggers the release of cortisol, putting your body into a state of chronic stress. Consumers of news risk damaging their health.
Imagine, for example, the stress of being a recipient of a continuous stream of bad news – civil war in Syria, for example, or terrorist outrages throughout the world, or Keir Starmer remaining Prime Minister – and there being precisely nothing that you can do about it. In such an environment might it be sometimes better not to know ?
News feeds confirmation bias
Within the relatively new school of behavioural economics, confirmation bias is one of our deadliest enemies. As Warren Buffett puts it,
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”
Once we’ve established a view on something, we have no real interest in changing it. Not only that, but we will fight tooth and nail to ensure that that view incurs no meaningful change – our minds are hardly as open or adaptable as we might think.
And the news is a perfect vehicle for establishing and protecting confirmation bias.
Take Brexit.
Many ardent supporters of both the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ camps spent a good deal of time on social media getting people to rally to their cause.
But because they spent so much time within their own digital ghettoes, they never got a wider appreciation of the bigger picture. The ‘Remain’ campaign in particular could not appreciate how anyone could possibly be in disagreement with them – which accounts in large part for the sense of denial that has gripped them ever since. How could they possibly have lost ? (And how could they still be obsessing about it, 10 years after the vote, if not the fact ? Because the news media may not know much, but it knows which hot buttons to press.)
There’s a wider point about that digital ghetto that happens to be our daily internet. The irony is that a medium that has never offered so much choice to engage with others globally means that we can spend our time entirely with those people we consider to be most like ourselves. The internet is a gated community for the mind – if we let it be.
News impairs thinking
In order to think, we need to concentrate. In order to concentrate, we need time. But that is not the imperative of the news media. News pieces are not designed to give you the luxury of time and deep understanding – the media want to provide instant gratification to that part of you that craves novelty, excitement, simplicity, and easy narrative.
The news is a distraction engine. It is time to switch that engine off.
News wastes time
By definition, time spent consuming news is time that cannot be devoted to any other activity.
There’s also a “switching cost” – the time it takes you to get back to whatever activity you were pursuing before the news distracted you.
Then there’s the insidious intrusion of news pieces long after the initial exposure and the original ‘hit’ of news.
We are drowning in information and yet starved of knowledge.
Information, courtesy of the internet, is no longer a scarce commodity. It is as ubiquitous as the air itself. But information is not knowledge. In most cases it is simply random data.
But your attention – your time – is the most valuable thing you possess. Even money can be replaced, but time never can. Why give it away so cheaply ?
News is made by journalists
We’re not suggesting that all journalists are bad. But we’re suggesting that most are.
The internet has forced a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of quality and thoughtfulness that most media organisations are struggling to win – and it’s a race that we don’t want anyone to win.
Our earliest experiences in journalism led us to conclude that the industry is riven with conflicts of interest but obsessed primarily by appealing to our lowest common denominator. Nothing that we have observed about the news culture, post-Brexit or post-Trump, causes us to challenge that thesis.
The first Director-General of the BBC, Lord Reith, summarised the broadcaster’s purpose in three words: inform, educate, entertain.
Reith, an intensely moralistic Aberdonian, pursued a goal to broadcast
“All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement”.
That put the BBC of the time at odds with the laissez-faire free market of US media, in which the largest audiences begat the largest advertising revenues. The news media will be wrestling with the powers of Mammon forever.
Do we honestly think that the average journalist today is tirelessly pursuing “all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement” ?
Or do we nurse a suspicion that the average journalist today is clinging on to a not-very-well-paid job and bouncing from one article to another at breakneck pace in pursuit of “clickbait” and “the large, the showy, and the noisy”.
Getting down to brass tacks, do we nurse a suspicion that the average financial journalist today might be much less well-informed about the industry than they should be ? Financial professionals are required to obtain specialist qualifications before they can practise. No such obligations or requirements are placed on financial journalists.
We would also draw a clear distinction between news reportage, with all its faults, and informed commentary, which almost inevitably requires taking a position. They are clearly not the same thing.
We don’t pretend for one moment that moving from a diet of ongoing news consumption to a freer life largely unconstrained by news altogether is easy to accomplish.
Nor are we advocating abandoning the media or the financial media in all their forms. We draw a clear distinction between the role of Substack, for example – which, when carefully curated can regularly offer up a pithy digest of recent financial news and informed commentary (and much else) from seasoned writers around the world – and that of the typical financial website – offering glib explanations for the most inconsequential market movements together with invariably wrong economic advice aimed at the political elite.
If the idea of going ‘cold Turkey’ from the news fills you with horror, start the withdrawal in stages. Rolf Dobelli adds,
“If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on it. Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.”
“Have fun reading.” A revolutionary concept in investment commentary.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds.
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”
Get your Free
financial review
This particular commentary has been some 35 years’ practical experience in the making. After reading it and taking its message to heart, a number of good things may slowly start to happen to you. Hours of time each week will be freed up for you to put to more productive use. You will think more clearly about the world around you. You will save money, alongside all that time. You will become less anxious. You will also become far happier. You may even become a better investor for it.
We are making the strongest case we can for you to
Stop consuming news
Here is the pitch from the mainstream media:
“Every weekday morning, I want you to listen to me for at least half an hour. I will speak to you, and you will just have to listen. I will give you information about a random series of events that in many cases will be disasters. Some of them – many of them – will make no sense whatsoever. I will determine the priority of these events, which will be highly subjective. I will give you little or no context, just an easy narrative – a tiny little nugget of a story, each time. I will not pay you for your time, but then again I will ask nothing from you in return – other than the implicit right to monetise your attention.
“I will then ask you to listen to me at intervals throughout the day. I will continue to share with you a madcap jumble of incidents, a hellish number of which will be excruciatingly dull political announcements. Most of this information will have nothing to do with you, but I will try and make you feel as if somehow you are responsible for all of it.
“I will then ask you to repeat this routine every day for 10, 20, 30 years – for your entire life, in fact.
“I am the news cycle. Will you be my friend ?”
Suspicions about the news business set in early for this correspondent. At school, we were in the year below a person who has attained some fame, if not outright notoriety, as the stand-up comedian and author Stewart Lee. January 1986 brought the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. On the day of the disaster, like many people, we saw (or allowed ourself to see) the video clips of the explosion replayed at least thirty or forty times. We remember Stewart’s commentary for that day, pinned to the Sixth Form Centre wall:
“Tasteless shuttle coverage suggests: don’t be a journalist, kids.”
But this correspondent wanted to be a journalist. So we were thrilled to get a subsequent internship at the Daily Express. We were less thrilled by our first mission: “Who do you know that’s famous ? Go off and get an interview.”
Our first experiences of journalism were all disillusioning. Which is perhaps why this correspondent’s first professional gig ended up being a bond salesman instead. Disillusioning, but in a far more expansive and educational way.
Entering The Shallows
Nicholas Carr, in his book ‘The Shallows’, makes a convincing case for the fact that the internet changes the way we think, read and remember. The internet literally changes our brain while we use it. He cites Marshall McLuhan’s earlier ‘Understanding Media’ which warned, an astonishing 30 years before the first web browser would even be launched, that
“The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which [our] way of life was formed.”
For McLuhan, the medium was and is the message. And we are almost powerless to resist.
The internet offers a feast of news,
“one course after another, each juicier than the last, with hardly a moment to catch our breath between bites. As networked computers have shrunk to the size of iPhones and BlackBerrys, the feast has become a moveable one, available anytime, anywhere. It’s in our home, our office, our car, our classroom, our purse, our pocket.”
There is no escape.
The Swiss author and businessman Rolf Dobelli suggests that what sugar is to the body, news is to the mind.
In the West, we have started to adapt to a world in which carbohydrates are not in short supply. Failure to adapt means either obesity or diabetes or some other form of physical illness through overconsumption.
But we have so far singularly failed to adapt to a world where news is not some kind of informational imperative, but rather a gigantic distraction from the pursuit of a full life.
“Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-coloured candies for the mind.”
Here, then, are the reasons for adopting a ‘news diet’:
News misleads us systematically
In the words of the stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius,
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
Acknowledging the inevitable imperfection of any service claiming to be offering “truth” is the first step toward freeing yourself from the digital tentacles of the news media.
Our brains are not well adapted for the vagaries of the modern world. We are essentially configured to pay attention to large, showy, noisy stimuli – hence the news media’s focus on images and graphics. We are not best placed to spend our attention on the small, abstract or complex. The news is about grabbing our attention, if only for a matter of seconds. Stories that are by definition more complicated get drowned out.
News is irrelevant
If you are a typical person, chances are that over the last 12 months you’ve consumed something like 10,000 news stories. Can you identify one which has enabled you to make a better decision about any aspect of your life ?
The consumption of news is irrelevant to what really matters to you. At best it will be entertaining, but it will almost always be irrelevant.
The news parades what is new when what is relevant is the real prize. But what tends to become relevant is almost by definition a slow-burn process. It takes time and effort, which the news media can ill afford to expend.
News doesn’t expand our understanding of things – it constrains it
Dobelli argues that news has no explanatory power. News items are simply “little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.”
But in the cause of craving a narrative and then believing what we’re given, we fool ourselves into accepting an overly simplistic causal account of why things happen in the news cycle.
Financial news is not exempt.
Thomas Schuster of Leipzig University has written a devastating account of how the financial news media consistently offer their customers a contrived, half-baked mess of spurious causality:
“The media select, they interpret, they emotionalize and they create facts. The media not only reduce reality by lowering information density. They focus reality by accumulating information where ‘actually’ none exists. A typical stock market report looks like this: Stock X increased because… Index Y crashed due to… Prices Z continue to rise after… Most of these explanations are post-hoc rationalizations. An artificial logic is created, based on a simplistic understanding of the markets, which implies that there are simple explanations for most price movements; that price movements follow rules which then lead to systematic patterns; and of course that the news disseminated by the media decisively contribute to the emergence of price movements.”
(From Thomas Schuster, ‘Meta-Communication and Market Dynamics; Reflexive Interactions of Financial Markets and the Mass Media’.)
At which point you might fairly ask: so how do I keep track of my stock portfolio if I’m not supposed to consume even financial news ?
Perhaps you shouldn’t. Not slavishly follow it on a daily basis, at any rate. Either way, although we don’t exactly subscribe to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, we would concede that for a short-form encapsulation of all information about a given security, it’s hard to beat the simple characteristic of its price.
Even here the seemingly objective value of news media is not wholly apparent. The psychologist Paul Andreassen showed that people who receive frequent news updates on their investments earn lower returns than those who get no news:
“The barrage of information and pseudo-information has been magnified by the explosion in financial news over the past decade. In the late 1980s, psychologist Paul B. Andreassen did a series of experiments with business students at MIT that showed that more news does not necessarily translate into better information. Andreassen divided students into two groups. Each group selected a portfolio of stocks and knew enough about each stock to come up with what seemed like a fair price for it. Then Andreassen allowed one group to see only the changes in the prices of its stocks. Students in that group could buy and sell if they wanted, but all they knew was whether the price of a stock had gone up or down. The second group was allowed to see the changes in price and was also given a constant stream of financial news that supposedly explained what was happening with each stock. Surprisingly, the less-informed group did far better than the group that was given all the news.
“The reason, Andreassen suggested, was that news reports tend to overplay the importance of any particular piece of information. When a stock fell, its fall was typically portrayed as a sign that further trouble lay in wait, while a stock that was on the rise seemed to promise nothing but blue skies ahead. As a result, the students who had access to the news overreacted. Because they took each piece of information as excessively meaningful, they bought and sold far more frequently than the people who were just looking at the price.”
(From Fast Company, 30 November 2002 – http://www.fastcompany.com/45655/too-much-information.)
News is harmful to your body
The news is a barrage of information continually hammering at your limbic system. ‘Bad’ news triggers the release of cortisol, putting your body into a state of chronic stress. Consumers of news risk damaging their health.
Imagine, for example, the stress of being a recipient of a continuous stream of bad news – civil war in Syria, for example, or terrorist outrages throughout the world, or Keir Starmer remaining Prime Minister – and there being precisely nothing that you can do about it. In such an environment might it be sometimes better not to know ?
News feeds confirmation bias
Within the relatively new school of behavioural economics, confirmation bias is one of our deadliest enemies. As Warren Buffett puts it,
“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”
Once we’ve established a view on something, we have no real interest in changing it. Not only that, but we will fight tooth and nail to ensure that that view incurs no meaningful change – our minds are hardly as open or adaptable as we might think.
And the news is a perfect vehicle for establishing and protecting confirmation bias.
Take Brexit.
Many ardent supporters of both the ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ camps spent a good deal of time on social media getting people to rally to their cause.
But because they spent so much time within their own digital ghettoes, they never got a wider appreciation of the bigger picture. The ‘Remain’ campaign in particular could not appreciate how anyone could possibly be in disagreement with them – which accounts in large part for the sense of denial that has gripped them ever since. How could they possibly have lost ? (And how could they still be obsessing about it, 10 years after the vote, if not the fact ? Because the news media may not know much, but it knows which hot buttons to press.)
There’s a wider point about that digital ghetto that happens to be our daily internet. The irony is that a medium that has never offered so much choice to engage with others globally means that we can spend our time entirely with those people we consider to be most like ourselves. The internet is a gated community for the mind – if we let it be.
News impairs thinking
In order to think, we need to concentrate. In order to concentrate, we need time. But that is not the imperative of the news media. News pieces are not designed to give you the luxury of time and deep understanding – the media want to provide instant gratification to that part of you that craves novelty, excitement, simplicity, and easy narrative.
The news is a distraction engine. It is time to switch that engine off.
News wastes time
By definition, time spent consuming news is time that cannot be devoted to any other activity.
There’s also a “switching cost” – the time it takes you to get back to whatever activity you were pursuing before the news distracted you.
Then there’s the insidious intrusion of news pieces long after the initial exposure and the original ‘hit’ of news.
We are drowning in information and yet starved of knowledge.
Information, courtesy of the internet, is no longer a scarce commodity. It is as ubiquitous as the air itself. But information is not knowledge. In most cases it is simply random data.
But your attention – your time – is the most valuable thing you possess. Even money can be replaced, but time never can. Why give it away so cheaply ?
News is made by journalists
We’re not suggesting that all journalists are bad. But we’re suggesting that most are.
The internet has forced a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of quality and thoughtfulness that most media organisations are struggling to win – and it’s a race that we don’t want anyone to win.
Our earliest experiences in journalism led us to conclude that the industry is riven with conflicts of interest but obsessed primarily by appealing to our lowest common denominator. Nothing that we have observed about the news culture, post-Brexit or post-Trump, causes us to challenge that thesis.
The first Director-General of the BBC, Lord Reith, summarised the broadcaster’s purpose in three words: inform, educate, entertain.
Reith, an intensely moralistic Aberdonian, pursued a goal to broadcast
“All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement”.
That put the BBC of the time at odds with the laissez-faire free market of US media, in which the largest audiences begat the largest advertising revenues. The news media will be wrestling with the powers of Mammon forever.
Do we honestly think that the average journalist today is tirelessly pursuing “all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement” ?
Or do we nurse a suspicion that the average journalist today is clinging on to a not-very-well-paid job and bouncing from one article to another at breakneck pace in pursuit of “clickbait” and “the large, the showy, and the noisy”.
Getting down to brass tacks, do we nurse a suspicion that the average financial journalist today might be much less well-informed about the industry than they should be ? Financial professionals are required to obtain specialist qualifications before they can practise. No such obligations or requirements are placed on financial journalists.
We would also draw a clear distinction between news reportage, with all its faults, and informed commentary, which almost inevitably requires taking a position. They are clearly not the same thing.
We don’t pretend for one moment that moving from a diet of ongoing news consumption to a freer life largely unconstrained by news altogether is easy to accomplish.
Nor are we advocating abandoning the media or the financial media in all their forms. We draw a clear distinction between the role of Substack, for example – which, when carefully curated can regularly offer up a pithy digest of recent financial news and informed commentary (and much else) from seasoned writers around the world – and that of the typical financial website – offering glib explanations for the most inconsequential market movements together with invariably wrong economic advice aimed at the political elite.
If the idea of going ‘cold Turkey’ from the news fills you with horror, start the withdrawal in stages. Rolf Dobelli adds,
“If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t spend more than five minutes on it. Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and we can do nothing about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.”
“Have fun reading.” A revolutionary concept in investment commentary.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds.
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